Collective Habits of Mind in White America? How Do We Begin...Continue...?

“Stacey Abrams certainly made her mark today,” she smiled, musing aloud over her coffee the morning she and her husband awoke to the news Georgia was turning Blue. He looked up from his iPad, having been immersed himself in the unfolding election drama. “It’s white voters in Atlanta who are shifting the State,” he said. She startled, and looked at him for a while, considering. She returned to her own read of the news.

This hypothetical exchange demonstrates something that seems particularly White and even potentially damning for all of us today, as endemic to higher education as it is: knee-jerk contradiction and refusal to consider larger stories than we hear on first impulse. Our immediate assessment may be one of racism, a prejudgment of some event within racialized terms. And it is that, because if you have White skin in the USA, you are interwoven with racialized presumptions. (See “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” Avenue Q, for a light-hearted banter about this. To deny being a racist is to presume one could be a purist and not have racialized assumptions, a thing impossible in the USofA history and caste system). But I want to ask a different kind of question, while not contradicting that one.

This exchange illustrates a habit of mind that is initially not collective...that doesn’t have a broad collective sense underneath it. Stay with me...this may take a little bit to get at, within text. This is a quiet, typical exchange between a husband and wife (who are both white), and yet a curious one too. The wife’s statement was true, no matter the color of voters. [This assessment should be deepened to include the sisters with whom Abrams made her mark in Georgia politics (Tamieka Atkins-ProGeorgia, Helen Butler-GCPA, Nse Ufot - New Georgia Project, and Deborah Scott - GA Stand Up). An illustration of collective-thinking, as Abrams has repeatedly offered in the social media and news media acclaim she has received]. The husband’s statement may have been accurate for the voters of that particular county, in metro Atlanta. It would take research to confirm. But why draw the distinction in the first place? Why the need to contradict a statement as bland as "made her mark"? Why the need to state it was White voters? Why not presuppose a collective in which Black and White voters together made the difference? 

I have found myself wondering how such a pattern could arguably originate within White heritage and what, if anything (else) can be done about it within me? Within those I love? Deep within the white bodies I know...what impulses rise and why? 

I’m connecting dots from something that clicked within me this past summer, when I heard a YouTube video of a man I’d never heard of before: Stephen Jenkinson. He is the focus of a documentary, Griefwalker, and has founded an educational community called Orphan Wisdom.

To cite from Wikipedia: “Orphan Wisdom is a method of inquiry gathered together and wondered about primarily, but not exclusively, by Stephen Jenkinson. Jenkinson expresses his experience in seeing what modern Western people "suffer from most is culture failure, amnesia of ancestry and deep family story, phantom or sham rites of passage, no instruction on how to live with each other or with the world around us or with our dead or with our history. Orphan Wisdom wonders about the origins and consequence of this state and contends with building skills to be in the presence of this fact.”  [To hear Jenkinson’s voice, you can listen to the first of seven clips here. It’s about 18 minutes long.] In this clip, he shares observations that I never really considered, having swum in the American politic unconsciously for so many decades.

My paraphrase of his observations in the video: The ancestors for so many white bodies in the USA today chose--out of necessity, most likely--to cut ties with all that they knew, to make a new life without economic servitude or religious persecution.  White bodies today have a heritage of disconnection and dissociation from all that came before, all that could not be survived. A friend/mentor of mine has quipped, with a smile: “Western ancestors are the least employed on the planet. They never get invited to help with anything.” To survive in the New World required a break with elders, with the wisdom of what had been before. A break in the human generational, ancestral line. Quite distinctive in the thousands of generations of human beings on the planet. White bodies broke with collective habits of mind to survive ‘on their own’ in a New World that they gambled on having a better chance at life than where and with whom they had lived before. This elemental decision of so many, over so much time, could so easily have this deleterious effect on white bodies’ ability to think collectively, to live through persecution (real or simply intergenerational-body-memoried). So much of the White American consciousness is this differentiation, this tendency to depart and divide.

Of course, it can be idealized in the notions of American self-sufficiency and individualism that can be seeds of innovation and artistry. But it can also show up in an utter refusal of limits, of loss, leading to an unconscious belligerence we are seeing so much of today, in White populations. (If communities of color are deemed 'belligerent,' I would call that conscious-activity, with good reason lived in their bodies, needing to protest to be seen and heard.) Or more subtly, this tendency can show up in an unconscious, kneejerk reaction of contradiction and refusal to see any larger pattern in anyone else’s suffering, anyone else's lineage. Like can happen over morning coffee, reading the news.

Regardless of the verifiability of such an observation, the question remains before us… What will it take for White America to develop (again? From within?) collective habits of mind? Ones that do not differentiate and divide from a larger and larger pattern of  meaning-making in the world?

The context of the conversation with Stephen Jenkinson was elderhood, an apparent crisis in elderhood. One can hear his words as commentary on the crisis of leadership in our world today, or more broadly, the challenge within American norms to value aging, becoming an initiated elder (able to sustain and share the wisdom of a collective), honoring the lineages through which we come, as American individuals. I think we could agree that our country is in a crisis of leadership, what many cultures would call elderhood. We have vastly different cultures surrounding what leadership is supposed to do/be, and what/whom we can accept as leader. We could parse until the Eschaton the modern-trope that young people need to lead in our world today, but thousands of generations of human beings have lived in cultures where young people didn’t have to lead...where the culture actually initiated its adults into elderhood, living wisdom of the collective as a whole. We do not live in a culture of initiated adulthood, moving toward elderhood.

Our leadership in the United States does not (by and large) demonstrate Elderhood: wisdom of ancestors, accountability to heritage/lessons learned, collective habits of mind, willingness to compromise/collaborate for the sake of the Whole, making unpopular decisions for the sake of the majority’s care of the minority, caring for the least-last-lost-poor-left-behind. [Note: not the leader’s care of the minority, but the leader’s leadership of the majority to care for the minority.] If anything, our government(s)--State and Federal--are increasingly adolescent (which I realize is an insult to adolescents). We are governed, heightened by media-sound-bites, by either/or thinking, win/lose philosophies, winner-takes-all money-driven discourse, refusal to compromise or collaborate, ultimately, name-call and disrespect of all who are not in ‘your tribe.’ Hardball, or nothing. 

It’s junior-high-time in the Senate and the House, driven by the worst impulses of power-over, greed, and disdain. It’s Junior-High Time in American politics because that is who we have become as an electorate. We do not realize that very few of us are in touch with our heritage, few of us are attuned to the reality of democracy (and its fragility) and its intense demand to be able to hold irreconcilables side by side as a community, as a collective caring for all. 

Lots more could be said here, of course, but for now… How does this crisis in elderhood originate for White America? How can we begin to look at our habits of mind that immediately contradict, resist, and refuse...all without throwing out science, the critical mind, the need to refine our common discourses with intellect yet steeped in the heart?

What work does White America need to do to reshape collective habits of mind, that more easily imagine larger patterns around us beyond what we know or have experienced?

What if what White America needs to wake up to is not only what we're hearing from communities of color--all justifiable--but elementally how white minds think in higher education? How they have been shaped in Protestantism, one of the most conflict-and-schism oriented traditions on the planet?

This would also be a HUGE inroad into liberal disdain...at root of higher education is this prioritization of criticism, of skepticism, often at expense of charity/caritas, of interdependence.

How do White people relearn COLLECTIVE habits of mind and body? How do educated White people learn their own predilection to criticize and demonize the unintellectual? Hmmmm....

Welcoming Home Our Loyal Soldiers...Could Some of Us (Who Can) Even Ask the Question?

Our country needs to find a way to honor its loyal soldiers, and I’m not only talking about our armed forces. I support our troops and am thankful for their service. What I want to talk about, however, is a way of honoring our loyal soldiers when the war is done. We have a problem in this country with never-ending war, whether on land or in discourse--Afghanistan/Iraq etc. or “war on drugs” or “war on crime” etc. I am not criticizing this state of affairs--it is what it is--but I do want to observe that we have little honorable way or cultural rituals for our loyal soldiers to return to peace.

This post begins with a story I learned from Bill Plotkin, ultimately to invite us to think creatively about this dynamic in our country, in our civic/uncivil discourse. I want to invite us as a society to consider and then perhaps create new ways to welcome home the loyal soldier. [Credit where it is due: much of this comes from Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing in the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, pp. 91-94]

The image I want us to consider comes from the end of WWII, as Japanese marines and soldiers who survived shipwrecks or plane crashes in the Pacific found themselves stranded, alone or in small groups, on uninhabited or sparsely settled islands. Some of them managed to endure despite extreme conditions and severe social-cultural isolation. As Plotkin observes, one of the most astonishing things was that “these men exhibited an extraordinary, perhaps fanatical, loyalty to their military mission. Unaware that the war had ended, each one, upon being found, was ready to immediately return to the war effort.” They were told that the war had ended...but the war could not be over for them. The war is what kept them alive all those years. In one case, he was found 35 years later. Imagine trying to live in a renewed society after that many years "at war", even if only in his own mind...

The Japanese, wise in the ways of honor in their culture, welcomed home the rescued soldiers with great honor and celebration. Despite the men's stubborn belief in the cause of military empire building, which had been clearly discredited. Japanese society had been decimated and then rebuilt; empire building was no longer what the society as a whole pursued. These loyal soldiers missed that development, in their isolation. Even so, society offered a sustained welcome to all these men as heroes, over months and years. This eventually enabled the soldiers to reinvent themselves and to productively rejoin their society as it had evolved.

As gruesome or counter-intuitive as it may sound, particularly given the level of suffering now more visible in this last year...I think there is something here we need to listen to, learn from. Plotkin’s use of this story is for a psychological journey, a journey to soul deeply rooted in Nature and Mystery. But in essence, he weaves it into an invitation for us to awaken to the loyal soldier who lives in each of us.

Each of us has a sub-personality that has functioned since early childhood to keep us safe, to read the needs and norms in our family of origin and protect us by making use of them. For some of us, these strategies are subtle psychological protections against emotional neglect or 'typical' family dysfunction; for others of us, these strategies are overwhelming internal-defenses necessary to protect us from abusive parents, drug addiction, failing schools, domestic violence, cultural shame and more. If you’re an adult today, your “loyal soldier” has kept you safe enough to be here, just as you are.

The problem, however, is that the Loyal Soldier’s strategies can become such bedrock to survival that they will be defended to the death, even after “the war of childhood survival” is over. Even after you’ve grown up and provided a viable-enough life for yourself. Even when you’re in a solid marriage and contributing to your local community. A superstitious belief system develops to give your Loyal Soldier battles s/he can fight. This belief system and these strategies become absolutely and eternally necessary to protect the wounded-one within, the emotional-sensual-playful-vulnerable part of each of us. The intimate self we share only with our loved ones, if even them. Because always, the Loyal Soldier in each of us can choose to disbelieve that the war of childhood survival is over. Many of us do not know life that does not include this kind of "everpresent war, out there." The loyal soldier may even intentionally provoke new battles just to prove his/her point.

All the while...these strategies prevent any development of deeper growth, deeper listening and learning, maturing relationships in a human community, or even just our own wholeheartedness (able to experience grief and joy both, intensely)... These strategies keep us isolated--except for those with similar survival mechanisms--alone, afraid, dissociated from our vulnerable Heart within...who can see the suffering of others, enter into compassionate holding response, act kindly in the face of violence, etc. Without a welcome home that honors him/her, gives times to re-invent and recreate, the Loyal Soldier creates war everywhere s/he goes.

See what I mean? There is something here for all of us, but especially for the 74 million of us who are facing the 70 million of us. A portion of our country’s population is demonstrating their loyal soldier subpersonality. It is not ALL of who they are, even if it is being the most visible right now. To ask in an uncomfortable way…

What is our human collective wisdom-responsibility to welcome them home, honoring their passions and creating spaces, finding ways, for them to re-enter a society that is not the one they thought it was…?

Can we we find a way to honor the intention to love our country so much, to fight for what they believe in so much...?

How may we create safe and viable ways for them to stay engaged, with honor, but more as the fully-human-being they are on the inside, that we can’t see amidst the violence and fear-mongered patriotism? 

There is a better way to live inside, and with one another...and if we know it, we need to begin living it "out loud" in a welcoming, inviting way.

Trump has shown us more of who we are as Americans, as ugly and even horrifying as we may find it to be. I've been reading liberal Blue posts like "The nightmare is over" and "Let's be friends again, no matter who you voted for..." But the nightmare is NOT over, nor CAN we simply be friends again while so many of us refuse to see the backbreaking, violent realities of so many others of us.

White America is resistant and ignorant.

Black America is building cultural communities while trying to stay alive.

Police are doing the best they can in this hornet’s nest, with some ‘bad apples’ traumatizing communities they are supposed to protect and other ‘good apples’ trying to find the moderate ways to build bridges.

Immigrants are finding their ways to survive in one of the most hostile American eras I’ve known, voting from their own double-edged sword of surviving truly Socialist countries (Cuba) and beginning to thrive in our country with an odd relationship to the word socialism.

The Republican leadership is refusing to accept the election results, and President Trump is hiding out in the White House, except when he plays golf.

Regular Republicans are trying to get on with their lives, hoping they can withstand what they did not choose while praying for the President.

We need to consider this dynamic, this question.  Demonizing Trump supporters simply makes "us" who "we" accuse "them" to be. There is no honorable or saving-face way for half the country to really look at what and who we are, as a Whole.

Those more healed always hold space for those who are healing...How do we welcome home as loyal soldiers those who need to know that this war is over and there is a society opening space for them, just as they are...so they can reinvent themselves and become peaceable human beings? How do we create spaces for a different personality to come through, inside each of us? How do we go about creating safe spaces for us to change the story, change the dynamic, break the cycle?

I don’t know, in the end...but I think we could learn a lot from the Japanese. The honor/shame culture in so much of Appalachian heritage has imprisoned so many of us, for so long. How do we break the cycle of shame, the wounded white-man-ego, the "I'd rather die than lose or look vulnerable" culture of this loyal soldier America?

Honor, somehow...space to grieve...time for all of us to reinvent ourselves...for the sake of the Whole.

Learning to Stay...See...Stop Resisting? What We See

I am wrestling with a tension in myself, seeking discernment amidst incredibly shifting sands. I am staying with the discomfort, or learning to stay as Pema Chodron teaches in one of her SoundsTrue series. This is the seed of Wisdom to come, I've learned...

To give a little context for that observation...I also find myself deeply thankful for a teacher-mentor from decades ago now, a man of deep faith in the power of the Spirit to transform transformations (he would say, picture below...). His work offered a pattern I have seen unfold innumerable times in my life of the Sacred, a consistently trustworthy pattern. In contrast to most assumptions about 'living faith,' it actually begins with a goad into discomfort (if we think of it in linear order). Not comfort or ease, not agreement with what you want. That's "Christianity" in empire, keeping you comfortable and imprisoned in shame/blame/guilt.

The doorway to freedom is discomfort and dissonance. Those are signposts you are living some kind of faith, not just thinking about it. Then the pattern demonstrates a human curiosity and irrepressible drive to scan for sense-making in that discomfort. Why is it different than what I expected? Why does this sting so? What is the root of the pain? This period can last a long time (like it surely will here in Ohio. (Sigh)). Eventually, though, our frames of reference eventually shift somehow, so to receive insight, to see anew that which was always there but simply inconceivable, unseen with what we'd known before. Until the frame of reference was large enough to hold what-clearly-is. A huge release of energy can come at this moment--a Eureka! or Oh! Why didn't I see that before?!? kind of energy. Then words come to make sense of inside, but also then to those around you. This is not only in religious/spiritual terms, btw. This is Einstein and the theory of relativity. This is Niels Bohr and his quantum mechanics. It's even audible in Bach's music.

The point here, however, is that intense discomfort or tension within myself is a sign of something potentially transformative, worth staying-with, maybe even beautiful to come...eventually...if/when I learn to stay with it, get curious about it, face the transformation of my world(view) which will be transformed again and again as I mature, age, grow...

...even though it is also honest to say that it usually sucks at the front end. Good-intentioned people of all faith traditions would rather have easy answers in black-and-white than truly live into the logic of the Spirit that will transform your life from the inside out. I get that, but I also know so many "religious folks" thereby miss out on all the abundance, scandalous grace, and heart-opening devotion and Love institutions can never contain...but we build institutions, not dreams or life-giving communities, right? Soren Kierkegaard told a parable of geese wobbling to church to hear how they could fly, only to wobble and squabble home.

So I have been wrestling with this tension in myself, seeking discernment amidst incredibly shifting sands: I take great satisfaction in my capacity to hold ambiguities, to practice bridge-building between irreconcilable opposites or divergent voices in earnest listening. It's a huge part of my own self-understanding, a pride in who I am, even as it is also a way I am with others, hoping to charm others into greater capacity to hold ambiguities, to see all sides of something "they already know about" but don't, fully. Because we never do, fully, ever.

Yet when is this fierce commitment to bridge-building, to holding irreconcilable opposites in peaceable ways, fooling myself? Being complicit with what needs mirroring in love while receiving in love what needs mirroring in me? When is my desire to see both sides a relinquishment of what needs seeing, saying, tending?

This week, I’m really wrestling with this question … What does it mean to open my heart in a fundamental way to those who voted for Trump, for reasons beyond my ken, even using my sizeable imagination and every grain of salt I can hold in my large white hands? How do I make sense of choices made by good-hearted people whose refusals I cannot even begin to name but which I feel and see how they threaten all I had thought more of us held dear? Hold dear? I've gotten pissy seeing all the FB memes about being a mature adult who remains friends with those across the political divide, even though I am committed to that too. But I'm pissy because something essential here needs saying, I think. There is difficult work to do in ourselves (me being a white woman in Ohio).

Waving off this 'something' as some 'political difference' shrugs off something absolutely essential to being human today. I don't even know how to describe what "this" is, but it's essential. And I can't just shrug it off to political differences. There is something fundamental about how broken Christianity is today, how broken-gridlocked government is today, and how good-intentioned people are getting ground up--grinding one another up--in fear, hatred, and violence while calling it faithful. I want to build bridges and yet...how? When a deep vulnerability has been exposed on the one hand, and the 'other side' just shrugs it off? Untenable for me. I cannot shrug it off.

Of course, I don’t have any answers to any of this today, even to say more of what "this" could be... And please note the emphasis on practice in all that above. No one is good at this in our country today, though the more-healed of us have a responsibility to hold space for this question. But there are no experts in something like this. Yet, the challenge must remain hanging here...How do we invite deepening engagement in those who want to simply shrug it off? How do you get people to care about something that they've not cared about before, or they've considered insignificant to their life, story, values? Particularly if to care means feeling discomfort and dissonance with what they know-think they know-wish they knew?

I’ve often said to my students, when teaching/learning in interreligious/intercultural or pastoral care courses: defense mechanisms are there for a reason, so should be honored. No one gets the right to force ‘their teaching’ onto you, forcing their way through your defense mechanisms “for the sake of good.” That kind of teaching is violent and authoritarian, and ultimately lives no trust in any Power More Than the One in Front (usually the teacher), highly ironic for a theological school, in my opinion. I’m therefore a necessary fan of “there’s not a right or wrong answer in my practical theological course, which is set to deepen your own ability to reason contextually and discern spiritually… There are better and worse answers, of course, evaluated by [these criteria]. But I do not judge ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (by and large) in my classes, because I cannot evaluate a student’s context and situation from afar. [It is possible to fail my courses, but it requires proof of hatred and an utter refusal to engage in any self-reflection...surprisingly, it's happened but it's actually pretty infrequent in my 16 years so far…]. So how do we honor defense mechanisms of others AND urge-encourage-invite them into what-is, which discomforts and disorients before it opens and transforms...?

Ironically, much liberalism within higher education presupposes a forced-response method,  litigated through school policies and legal statements of what ought to be, within the values and ethos of the school. Without such an approach, we never would have begun to value the voices of women, of those previously unheard in the hallowed halls of higher education. I cannot count the shoulders of the number of women I'm standing on today because they fought the political battles in policy-political terms in institutions that refused to honor their voices, wisdom and more. Until shame or some other political motive pushed through statues and laws, policies and regulations...which are now eroding because no one's hearts were changed from the inside out. Power-over and political hardball has been the pathway to where we are. Which, to be clear, I’m not against as an approach in educational institutions, particularly if no other paths or tools are recognized. To quote the West Wing episode--I know the value of a proportionate response now. "It's what we have," says Leo. Yet I wonder.... Are we nearing enough of a brink to actually consider process and humane wisdom? Because we all know the fruit of hardball in our civic discourses today. Litigating transformation of the heart is impossible, with a process that is violent and dehumanizing of the story(ies) involved.

So how do we begin to re-write the stories here? I dunno... I dunno... Listening...

I am no longer surprised at much this week, when I really sit with it, feel my way into it. It dawns on me now, in a bit more cried-out-calm while still awaiting resolution to the election: what I experienced may not have even been surprise, as much as it was resistance. A refusal, alongside finally the inability to refuse, to resist seeing.... When I don’t surrender to surprise, I do feel the pain of incongruities, the fervent desire for something I sense to not be so. I resist seeing what-is...and I feel pain, disorientation.

Resistance is often my preliminary response, after all, to refuse awareness of some deep belly sadness, grief, and yes, even anger. (For good or ill, anger is my go-to...it feels ‘more in control’ than being sad, and my control-impulses are strong). Consistent in my body’s learned defenses, I also resist utter joy or ecstasy, which you’d think everyone would want to feel, even if not express openly or loudly. Nope. In my family’s heritage and in my family’s religious tradition (Presbyterian Church), deep feeling is suspect, to be identified in rational categories, and thought into its purpose or box. Feeling and expressiveness of too much was politely unacceptable, whether perceived ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ So to reconnect inside, the capacity to feel what arises, to sense what is really present, is a struggle for me. I suspect it is a struggle for most of the people I know, actually. Emotion is perceived as weak, being out of control, sometimes even irresponsible.

But If I were to surrender… If more of us could see our resistance as the cause of the pain, not the actual what is of this week… If more of us would open our hearts in a fundamental way (Leonard Cohen again), seeing ourselves more clearly, refusing to project “it” onto “them”... Really taking on the reality that we (largely white folks here in Ohio) co-created (without consciousness, even without malice, but with refusals…)... How might more of us begin to see Us...and then more clearly...all of Us?

Might we finally not resist seeing

• we are a society choosing to live on the surface with each other, with few deeply-human cultural practices holding us together anymore (What cultural rituals/practices might we create together, anew?)

• we don’t know how to feel what we feel, certainly not in public (What if we created ‘containers’ in which deep feelings could be held safely, bravely, seen and heard? Circle, for instance...)

• we are titillated by reality-tv and violence, in order to feel anything (what if feeling were welcomed--all of them--and life became more vibrant than any of us knew it could be without the tv or social media?)

• we would rather project all we cannot hold or bear ourselves--the incongruities that feel impossible and judgmental--moving them  “out there,” onto someone else (what if we refused to project? What if we strengthened our capacity to see our own shadow(s) as steps on the path to abundance and grace?)

• we cannot bear to even hear the suffering of others without first prioritizing our own (what if we deepened our ability to tend and hold our own pain, knowing its healing...opening spaces for truly hearing and receiving the pain of others?)

Sitting with all of these tensions, then, I remember that I can never build bridges alone, that it takes two shores and risked construction between them. I, myself, am not the bridge, nor am I responsible for others’ choices or journeys. I can be invitational, however, and learn alongside… I can practice protecting my own heart when she needs it, like she did this week. I can continue to stay in the discomforts and invite others into them as well.

Changing how we live in community, in civic rhythms, needs to change here in Ohio. I don’t know the pathway forward, but I do know that it won’t be easy, nor pretty. At first.

It will be stunningly beautiful “on the other side” of the decades to come...if/when more and more of us lean in...

Sanctuary, Rest, Then Sail On...Sail On...

 EARTH ... COURAGE ... CALM ABIDING...

EARTH: Today seems wise for a mental health day, so I'm packing up a light lunch for a drive into the wide blue sky, (climate-changing)-summer-breezes, and some unplugged time with my feet on the Earth and my heart dog, Nala, as co-pilot. I've learned so much about all the Work ahead, even as I will continue to 'surrender to surprise' in the days to come...

COURAGE comes from the most unexpected places, even so. I know who Leonard Cohen is (was), though I'm not an avid fan, by any means. So imagine my surprise when I was led to his song, Democracy, three separate sources. It's a good 5 minutes' gift to yourself today, if you create space for it. It's honest, brilliant, irrepressible...just what I needed today.

CALM ABIDING... I'm aware of a deep belly grief and even horror at being White in America today...but I am also much clearer that anyone who is surprised at the lack of Blue Wave, the lack of moral repudiation has similar work to do as I do, as White voters in the USA have to do. For myself, for integrity's sake, I will continue to allow it all to arise in my cells and tear ducts..."keeping my heart open in a fundamental way."

Just as GK Chesteron quipped decades ago about Christianity, so Cohen reminds us about Democracy. Chesteron wrote “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” Christianity is broken today, unless within communities of color (an intentionally wide generalization that can be cherry-picked with examples of communities of color enthralled with prosperity gospel and more...but I'm leavin' the statement to stand for its discomforting condemnation of the White Protestant America I belong to...) . I don't know what to do with that as a seminary professor, but I'm listening.  

And Cohen croons...a middle verse that reminds us one and all...Democracy

It's coming to America first

The cradle of the best and of the worst

It's here they got the range

And the machinery for change

And it's here they got the spiritual thirst

It's here the family's broken

And it's here the lonely say

That the heart has got to open

In a fundamental way

Democracy is coming to the USA

So listen to the YouTube gift of the song, all the way through...as many times as required to get back at it, listening to the voices you don't want to hear, and our damning heritage alongside the brilliant ideals of the USofA. 

[And a powerful essay for us to read in Ohio...why DO white people in MidAmerica vote against things that nearly every other modern society values as civilization and humane treatment of one another? Hmmmm....

https://eand.co/americas-problem-is-that-white-people-want-it-to-be-a-failed-state-bac24202f32f]

What Needs To Come -- Claiming That Too

So tonight I stumbled into a FB live “Vespers” service held by a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Bloomington, Indiana. Carrie Newcomer put a blurb on her FB page, otherwise I never would have known about it or even thought to look for something like that. Newcomer is a Hoosier-singer-songwriter-poet-podcaster-with-Parker-Palmer I’ve known through her music for well over a decade now. I clicked the link, landing into a sacred space, an intentional ritual space for prayer, song, lament, courage. The tears came freely and urgently, in the privacy of my own home, my sacred sit-spot couch… The waves of tears

continue to come… And I continue to learn that I am strong enough to withstand the grief that is coming...is here...

Because these tears are not about the presidential election, per se. Neither elderly man will be able to heal this nation, though admittedly there’s only one of them who has expressed the heart to stand in to try…bringing a fiercely competent Black woman as his VP. A woman who’s seen more shit than many of us would know, I’m sure. Will we open our hearts enough to learn from a Black woman, from what Black women have been saying for decades, if not centuries…?

Tonight I heard a practice I will live into in these next days…saying aloud, with gestures:

 

EARTH…(gaze downward, grounding my body, my beautiful flesh in our sacred Earth)

COURAGE…(hands palms down on my thighs, eyes and heart open for new seeing)

CALM ABIDING…(hands palm open, outward, slightly away from my body in a welcome…)

(repeat)

We sang a song I’ve known in both church camp and Red Tent circles: Make Me a Sanctuary. Carrie Newcomer sang her song, Sanctuary. She sang a new song at the end of the service, a small poem from Howard Thurman: Sing a New Song.

And I wept...big ugly snotty tears weeping...

Tonight I know, I must let the tears come….not the escapist “white woman’s tears” I’ve been trained to squash, to just suck it up and not be fragile… Not the proverbial “white woman’s tears” that ask for sympathy or care from anyone ‘out there’... No...these tears that must come are simply my work...the work of any healthy, hurting human body that has been dealt a blow so familiar these last years… My body is a white woman’s body, with a pussy able to be grabbed and microaggressions accepted and dismissed for years… All of this writ in our large civic scene is so familiar, even with my protections and circumstance. 

Tears of impotence and frustration come next...

It’s important to name these tears, simply to claim them too… To invite more of us into the weeping-wisdom-work...especially white folks, but all human beings who hurt. We need spaces and ‘containers’ that are safe-brave spaces to hold the grief, the weeping, the messy, snot-shooting out the nose crying from the belly that pushes all the air out of your lungs tears...

Everyone has reasons they would cry out their cells, if you’d sit with your body long enough…

I wept tonight because dear friends of mine lived their hard-earned freedom in a way that wounds all of us even as the American ideal is such that that freedom is protected, as it is for me/mine

I wept tonight because I cannot withstand the pain of betrayal--betrayal of the American Heart and Hope I thought we had shared...betrayal of any protection for the marginalized, poor...

I wept tonight because all of us who don’t fit the white, gendered roles that traditionalist folks presume are in increased jeopardy, fear, and danger

I wept tonight because people of color are facing once again the utter refusal of white women to do their own work, see our role(s) in the systems we’ve created

I am weeping because I can’t do a damn thing about the pain, for myself, for anyone, except let it come...Just let it come...

Who We Are Then...Let's Just Claim It

I’m getting a much clearer picture of where I live today and who I really am, truths that I hope will set me, those I love, and those I do not yet know free...a freedom for more than a freedom from... I’m not sure what the import or calling of this new clarity will be...

I’ll begin where many of us seem to start, here in the USA--a TV show. My husband and I are through the first season of a rather satirical show quite uncharacteristic for me, if not for him. He likes things like House of Cards while I choose to watch only West Wing. He likes the show actually titled Dark and I’d prefer to spend my evening seeing Moonstruck for the hundredth time, or the sentimental Our Souls at Night. Life is hard enough as it is, I figure, so why watch TV that mirrors life as it is instead of how it could be? I do always agree to watch the first episode of anything he might choose, but I also refuse to stay in a world where every single character is unhappy. Like Mad Men, the advertising drama that won rave reviews and artistic creds. Why spend my time there? I would ask him. Not one character is happy or shows any hope. 

But this show--I’ll call it a light-noir on Amazon-Prime--has been cathartic for me, for some reason: The Boys. It’s a topsy-turvy ‘superhero’ universe in which the ‘heroes’ are pawns of corporations and the only really moral character, a young white man named Hughie, is being shaped as the super-villain to come. It has much to recommend it, at least if you don’t have a tender stomach. Maybe it’s cathartic because the writing shows me something I can now more easily point to in my world today. It’s good to get it outside of me, truly look at it.

The character with whom I want to begin, the character who really shows me today where I live and who I am inside, is Homelander, the strong-man of the “Seven:” a flag-draped-caped blond-haired, blue-eyed muscle man who was raised in the lab of an American scientist. Without spoiling the plot too much, there is a divide in popular perception about super-heroes. The bulk of the world lauds and applauds whenever Homelander steps into any public gathering, on stage or not. He is acclaimed for keeping the public safe with his superpowers. 

The reality we get to see slowly revealed over 6-7 episodes is quite different. There are “collateral damage” support groups in hospitals and churches--those who have been seriously wounded or have lost a loved one because a ‘superhero’ made a mistake or misused his/her power. There is a marketing team to make sure the truth of those ‘mistakes’ does not ever get the big screen. And the Vought Corporation is lobbying the government to use “their product,” super-heroes, in the armed forces around the world. Eventually, you can see each character as a person with intense grief and pain, enthralled or addicted, being a pawn in a game they have no real idea is being played on them. Even Homelander himself.

In this scenario, he is the public-strong man, but in actuality, he is a grown man who is unmothered, unloved, insecure and “kept” in a lifestyle he has known at the Vought Corporation. To quote a fellow I read earlier this week, “He is a weak man who has always longed to be a strong man, and he is a weak man’s idea of a strong man.” [Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World].  He is the by-product of an American scientist who created a little boy with Compound V to have super-hero powers--laser-gun eye sight, indestructible skin, capacity to fly anywhere on the planet in moments, etc. This little boy had no woman in his life, ever, nor any human touch, affection, connection, belonging. He was and is the “prime product” of a Corporation.

Ultimately, for our purposes here, today, he is a white man who has never truly known what being human is.... He’s never known the love of a woman, be she a mother, a sister, a life companion. He’s never known the gift of being himself in a family; he’s only ever had to protect or defend other people’s families. He’s certainly never known or had mirrored to him that he is loveable just as he is. He doesn’t know how to love himself. No one has ever shown him how.

The relationship with “his director” at the Corporation is a grotesque but easily recognizable parody of a loving relationship between a professional-corporate woman and this so-called “strong man.” Sometimes she plays mother to his unmothered child-self. He suckles her breast and coos in her lap while she uses her body to satiate his anger, his need. Sometimes she plays seductress to his physical prowess, riding on top of him in a sexual encounter in which she yet slaps his hands away, attempting to stay safe amidst his overwhelming power that could easily wound her in a “loving embrace.” Ultimately, she is a professionalized woman who has “made it” in corporate life, all while enslaved to her internalized fear of the very product she is supposed to “sell” to the public.

I think I’m drawn to Homelander today, of all days, because he lives visibly into a fictional universe the grotesque damage all around us today...which includes damage done to him, done to men and successful women who have learned to live with internalized fear of men in our world today, all of whom then do overwhelming damage to women, children, and to the earth. I’m drawn to this caricature of a man, of a leader, because this is actually who Ohioans have chosen as palatable and the ‘necessary evil’ for their economic or ideological gains. This is where I live and so this is where I am--at least, if I truly stand in the Oneness of things, which I do.

We in Ohio are a man who 

• Lies repeatedly and incessantly, not knowing that truth-telling and transparency are at the root of intimacy, a love that liberates (and he lives inside of me, whenever I cover up what I see and remain quiet)

• Smiles and jeers at human pain and suffering to push it away (which I have done, pushing away others’ pain and suffering I know not how to hold)

• Believes economic security will protect him and his family from everything that he fears (which my husband and I choose in today’s world too--I mean, why wouldn't we? We also relinquish resources to be free of them, and yet…)

• Acts invulnerable because he would rather die than be considered a woman (a behavior I lived for decades in theological education, because it was the only way to ‘play the game’ and survive with all the white men and male-identified women around me...)

• Refuses to show emotion, especially not tears, because he’ll either get the shit kicked out of him if he does [by other men] or get humiliated for “being weak” [by women who haven't done their inner work] (refusals which I learned as well, in a family that talks more than it feels)

• Has been mothered by internalized-fearful women and spiritually-damaged "Christian" men so to become little boys in grown-men’s bodies, isolated from themselves, dissociated from their own vulnerability through aggression and power-over, and an increasing threat to the earth (which I was myself, until I was broken open to my body as a woman, received mothering love not as a transactional-love earned but as a love that liberates, and lived into risked true communion with mySelf, fully present in my own body, renewing my roots with the Earth)

I think I have coped and navigated these last four years with an assumption that Homelander is the anomaly in our country today, even our world, arguably led by the beacon of the American Idea, the Experiment of a constitutional democracy-dancing-with-Republic. Today, I’m not surprised or even shocked, and there is even a lightness in me to finally come clean with who we are as citizens of the USA. This is who white America is today, so let's finally come clean about it. Denying it just pushes it further underground and onto "them," who we divide from our "we." Something in our "us" is in all of us, and this something today is Homelander.

We are Homelander and those who have crafted lives in fear of Homelander, so much so that resistance remains impotent, focused in solely ideological-identity-politics ways. We are fighting ourselves and denying, blaming, injuring the earth and her vulnerable more and more in our denials. So much effort has been spent trying to get the American Collective to approve of our identity(ies), to not kill our people, or to legislate our identities into a collective that has only ever been governed by Homelander's damaged self/selves. We then try to push this weak-man's 'strong-man' toxicity away, saying it is "them," over there, not "us"...not at all, anymore. Further isolating. Further damaging...

Homelander is not an anomaly. It's who we have allowed our Collective to become, as the white-suburban-rural tyranny-of-the-minority-United States of America, duped by a weak man's idea of a strong man, lived by the white Christian men we were duped into believing would save us.

At least, this is who Ohio is today and I live in Ohio. If I profess the Oneness of things, which I do, then I am Homelander.

"Christians" shaped by masculine dissociations will push this "we" away next under the notion of sinfulness, using other such doctrinal categories/terms to diagnose a human condition always damned. I think that’s a cop-out and a weak-response of weak-minded men and male-identified women who want to remain emotionally unaffected and hope it'll be better "out there." No matter what happens in the next couple of days, at least we can now finally see who we are right now, willing to make bad choices for even worse gains. It's better for all of us if we really let the pain and grief and unhealed trauma BE FELT as deep as it goes. And then do that again.

For until we do, we are so far from being fully human, and many of us calling it "Christian." Many of us will shake it off and say it's not that big a deal, whatever will unfold here in these next years.

Here in Ohio, we ARE Homelander.