I had the great opportunity to present this poem as part of the arts and culture initiative at the Equity Summit 2015 in Los Angeles this week. What an amazing experience to be part of this gathering of people who are changing the world through policy and practice that promote equity! This poem was the opening for a session titled Faith Leaders Delivering on the Promise of Equity. My hope is that we are able to make a difference regardless of how we do or do not acknowledge the presence of faith in our lives.
How will you pray for me?
Will you summon your God
Will you call on your symbols
Will you tell me your ritual
Is that all you can say?
How will you pray?
How will you pray for me?
When you see me in chains
Will you judge
Will you jury
Will you sentence my stay
How will you pray?
How will you pray for me?
When my head is covered and yours is bare
If my language is ancient
And yours barely there
If my day of rest
Is your hardest day of play
How will you pray?
How will you pray for me?
Will you see my skin
Will you feel my body
Will you know my mind
Will you understand my words
Or will you put them each
In a separate place
Or order or way…
How will you pray?
How will you pray for me?
If I don’t pray at all
If I am not called or calling
Deemed or damaged.
If I see myself not broken
But beautiful every day.
How will you pray?
And if you’ve never prayed
And if you don’t have the time
And if you see faith as sanctified crime
And too much of a price for your sense of self to pay
Can you still look in my eyes
Hold my joy or hear my cries.
Can you love me,
Love me,
Love me,
Love me just enough
In your own way
And pray?
When I walked into Overlake Christian Church, I half expected the walls to come crashing in. OCC is what you would call a modern day “mega church.” In a building that more resembles Costco from the outside than any other kind of structure, it is a teeming city within, just as any of the more ornate ancient Gothic mega churches such as Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres Cathedral were in their day. There are legions of volunteers, several varieties of youth spaces including a youth chapel and a fully staffed nursery, a full gymnasium, meeting rooms, offices and a cafe with (this being the suburbs of Seattle) what seemed like endless gallons of coffee.
But also like the ancient cathedrals, Overlake is serious about the business of faith. The sanctuary put me in mind of the largest theaters I’ve performed in with capacity for some 5000+ people. I imagined that when full, as I was informed that the space gets for the later service, this place was off the chain. This church sits in the heart of the evangelical nouvelle vague where young families in increasing numbers are flocking to a message about Christ that doesn’t judge them because they are struggling to make ends meet or because maybe they didn’t finish school or because they believe in traditional conservative values. This is a place where these particular young people find community that offers them unconditional support and love in a language they can readily understand. Yes, there were surely gun owners; yes, plenty of McCain/Palin supporters; probably a lot of anti Obamacare people as well…and me.
If you have read any of my other posts, you know immediately that I did not support McCain/Palin, I don’t believe in any kind of gun ownership (private or otherwise) and I am a rabid supporter of the Affordable Care act. I am also black and very, very gay. Walking into Overlake or any conservative community, I know that by the simple appearance of my skin, most people will assume my political positions, but the one thing they can’t and usually don’t assume is my sexuality. This is a squirmy discomfort that I’ve lived with my entire life, whether it was as a teen meeting people who would ask me if I had a girlfriend yet or in a locker room where guys talk incessantly and rather defensively about sex with women (hmm, there’s a blog post in there) or as a cruise director where the singularly most frequent question I was asked was if I was married. For some 35 years, I have had to “come out” to every single new person I meet. One of the reasons I am pro marriage equality, outside of personal interest, is because maybe by “normalizing” same sex relationships it will chip away at the assumptions that force someone like myself to have to repeatedly go through this public explanation process that more than being embarrassing is just plain exhausting. This kind of daily “coming out” is heightened even more in a church setting…let alone an evangelical one. But, as I said, I’ve been doing this dance for many years so when I was invited by my dear friends to attend their church, it was easy to put my own disquietude aside and let myself feel deeply flattered that they wanted to include me in their spiritual experience.
After dropping off the kids, we made our way through the throngs of beaming faces to the sanctuary where the house band was already in gear. The music was youthful guitar heavy rock. The voices were clear and again…the beaming faces. In the house, many people swayed and sang along (the words were projected on the largest of the flat screen monitors…a 20×30 foot jumbotron at the back of the stage) and many stood with their eyes closed and palms turned upward to receive the spirit…with beaming faces. The music built a certain frenzy so that when the pastor, Mike Howerton arrived on stage you wouldn’t expect anything less than being inspired. His message, “Hope Restored” was clear and hip (he wore jeans and converse sneakers) with no “thou shalts” and “wherefores” other than what might appear in specific scripture. The service ended with a tricked out version of “Oh Come Emmanuel” that was just plain fun to sing. The experience was, in a word, thrilling and I left feeling inspired and elated. I thought to myself, why can’t Unitarian Universalists do this? Wanting to stay focused on my time with my friends, I didn’t stay to socialize or chat. But on my way out, I made note of what seemed like a whole lot of nice people enjoying church the way they wanted to enjoy it, giving their families the grounding that they felt was important to being successful and balanced people. I should have been content with that.
But after I got home the next day, I did my usual skeptical due diligence to see where this community stood politically. It was not enough for me to see them first hand and accept them in their natural habitat. I had to see if they would have strung me up had they known I was a card carrying ‘homosexualist!’ A simple Google search (“Overlake Christian Church LGBT”) turned up the following article from the Christian Telegraph:
The article is very definitely anti-Gay (a clue should have been seeing AIDS not capitalized.) But looking past the article at the actual act of an evangelical church asking members to take an HIV test, I was blown away. Again, I found myself asking, why can’t Unitarian Universalists do this? At the center of this article were Linda and Rob Robertson who lost their gay son in 2009. I did a bit more research and came across, or rather was reminded of Linda’s blog, Just Because He Breathes. Their family story of transformation through their faith to embrace their son in all of his beauty as a gay Christian before his death is extremely powerful. I had read her article in the Huff Post in July and suddenly felt ashamed that I was in her church and didn’t know…or feel comfortable to seek her, or someone like her out. I immediately reached out to Linda through her blog and to my amazement, she wrote back. I am hopeful that I will be able to continue a dialogue with her, not only to support her work, but also to learn from her. I see a lesson for progressives and liberal church goers as well as Atheists and non believers here. Linda is a Christian. She lives what she believes. From the most painful experience that any parent can undergo regardless of their faith, she learned that she cannot judge. As a Christian, I imagine that she knows that judgment is in God’s hands. But that is not to say that for those who are not Christian that they must play by those same rules; judgement, peace, balance are what we come to in our own experiences and we cannot require that others accept something just because it works for us…and ultimately, it is out of all of our hands. Just as someone who is LGBT cannot be judged by the rules of heteronormativity and just as Christian evangelicals should not all be judged by the same rules of liberal intolerance.
Personally, I am tired of religious irony. My own snarky, judgmental attitude about a Christian mega church, no matter how much in check I was able to keep it in the moment, almost kept me from making a beautiful discovery about the depth and capacity of the human heart. Every religious leader or aspiring religious leader should be so lucky as to be able to float in the warmth of what I witnessed at Overlake, and every religious or faith community should be able to provide that warmth to whoever comes into their midst, whether it is a liberal black gay guy in an evangelical church or if it is an evangelical in a community of Pagans. We are in the business of creating community and those communities are built on “common unities”…shared experiences of our worlds. There is no possible way that everyone is going to have the same common unities…and we shouldn’t really want to have the same ones. But it is the impulse to gather and share those common unities that is the same among all of us and that is something in which we can all share; that impulse is love. I am a Unitarian Universalist and I will celebrate your joy at commemorating the birth of Christ. You are straight and I hope you can celebrate my thriving in a relationship with the man I share my life with. We are Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Atheist, Lesbian, Transgender, Cisgender, HIV+, black, Latino and white and we can celebrate one another and be much better for it.
I am a regular church goer. A few years ago when I started to get serious about my commitment to becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, I figured that a more frequent appearance than Christmas Eve was probably a good idea.
Going to church is not a big stretch for me. I come from a fairly churchy family and was a regular until I was 13. Even when I left at that tender age, I knew that I wanted to return some day. But as an adult things have been different. Before entering seminary, I often felt that I didn’t have the proper time on Sunday to go to Church, which made it difficult. Even now, I’m writing this blog on a morning where I’ve had to make a choice between getting my school work done and being part of my church community. I think many men struggle with this. Work all week; ‘honey do’ list on Saturday…leaving Sunday as the one day that you can be unscheduled. Of course Sunday options are limited: watch or play sports, read, shop, do more work (case in point)…or, as a last resort, go to church. Most men choose the sedentary version of the first on this list (sports), making it ‘their time’ and even though most professional games (whether they be baseball, football or basketball) don’t begin until well after even the late church service has ended, there’s that thinly veiled excuse out there about not wanting to miss the game, which requires watching the pre-game and the pre-game pre show and of course you have to get as much rest as possible leading up to that, so really there is no time for church.
Bullshit.
Now, I am not at all writing this as some kind of holy roller, Bible thumping, hellfire and damnation preacher who wants to blame men for the downfall of religion in America. No, really, organized religion is doing a good enough job of imploding itself without any help from men. As I said, I am in seminary, but I’m studying in the Unitarian Universalist faith and for those of you who don’t know about UUs (as we call ourselves), this is as good as saying that I might (stress might) just decide to wear clothes to church and if I do choose out of my free will to be clothed, my garments will most likely include sandals and some form of fair trade hemp. You see, among the Unitarian Universalist seven principles is the free and independent search for truth and meaning (although contrary to popular belief, most of us go to church clothed.) We genuinely believe that everyone is welcome at the table…even if they don’t believe in a God, or a supreme being…or tables. So, my reason for wagging my finger at men who don’t go to church and choose football instead is simply because a lot of men have walked away from the church experience for the reasons I listed before and in doing so, have left themselves out of something that is damaging men everywhere. This absence of men in the pews supports a bizarre cultural stereotype that church and therefore spiritual connection is somehow only for girls. And lets be clear here, I’m not talking about supporting the challenging and historically oppressive patriarchy that has come out of some traditions. My point is that the real spiritual life of men and masculine identified people matters; in fact, it is more important now than it ever has been…hence the title of this piece, and we owe it to ourselves and the world around us not to ignore the spiritual and communal aspect of our humanness.
When I’m referring to “church” here I am definitely referring to small “c” church. In fact, I also mean to include temple, mosque, prayer garden and any place that people gather or put themselves to engage in a spiritual experience. But this dearth of men in what are traditionally shared spiritual experiences is most visible in Western Christian churches. We are currently in an age when, in Western culture, increasing numbers of people have no church affiliation and a significant portion of those people are male identified.1 As a seminarian, I spend a lot of time reading about this and talking to people about why or why not they attend church. Fairly consistently when I speak with men, they mention that their mother always wanted them to do it growing up (guilt) or if they are married to a woman…their wife goes (she’s holding the place for both of you), but they aren’t interested and more than anything how they find it boring (no beer, smashing heads or cheerleaders.)
But I would conjecture that it is not so much church that is boring as what Western men have been trained to look for in church that is boring. After working all week long when you are asked in your job to follow rules, or fulfill needs or meet deadlines, why would you go to a place that is going to tell you about more rules, make you feel guilty for the needs you haven’t met in others and put you on a schedule that makes you get up on the one morning when you can choose to stay asleep? By these standards, church (still small ‘c’) is the antithesis of what Western men want to do with their free time. I was just reviewing some more great statistics from the Pew Forum. On the surface, the numbers tell the story where 59% of men in America identify as “Unaffiliated” where as only 41% of women identify as such. Jehova’s Witnesses and the historically black church lead the way with the percentages of women who identify with these traditions outnumbering men by some 20%.2 But then in the same chart, we see Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu men outnumbering the women in their self identifying by nearly the same margin. At first glance one might look to the prominence of men in each of these traditions to be the reason behind these numbers. The male role in each of these non-Christian traditions is worthy of several dissertations let alone a Sunday morning blog post. Plus, each of these non-Christian traditions maintains a certain amount of rigor in terms of practice (prayer rituals, rites of passage) and lifestyle (diet, clothing) which on the surface appears to be significantly more time consuming and restrictive than being asked to teach Sunday school once a week or simply put a dollar in the collection plate. But at the same time, each of these traditions, and their many variants, also offer a more specific connection to cultural and racial identity. It is certainly worth asking how this element plays into keeping men identifying as Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu.
In the long run, what I’m really talking about is what I call capital ‘C’ Church. It is bigger than any one tradition or organized group, though it includes and welcomes them all. You might call it “spirit” another might call it something else all together. Regardless of the word or language or tradition, this is a connection to one’s inner life; a connection to one’s community; a connection to one’s family and taking the time to embrace and acknowledge these; a connection to what it means in an authentic sense to be male identified and how it is neither a burden nor a privilege, but one of the many states of human being to be celebrated and cherished without hubris. This ability to connect to the web of humanity, is something that can be beautifully experienced with others through ritual, or it can be experienced in solitude alone on a beach. What matters is that this crucial part of what makes us, does not go un cultivated and under nourished. We are even seeing Atheists in growing numbers, who are coming together to acknowledge the need and desire to enrich themselves through acknowledging their humanity. Many of these “New Atheists” are indeed men, although in a recent series of Salon.com articles the prominence of men in Atheism is called into question as a symbol of patriarchal structures held over from other traditions3…again, another dissertation.
Ultimately, most American men are spiritually out of shape. What they need to realize is that there are options for how to tone up the spiritual flab and yes, it might mean missing a football game or two. By occasionally praying to something other than the Heisman Trophy, one might just find a deeper connection to and understanding of themselves, other men, masculine identified people and the women and children in their lives. If you choose to go to church on Sunday morning, instead of going like a petulant brooding 12 year old, go like an adult who is looking to invest more deeply in the experience here on earth or in the next life or whatever will take you into your particular spiritual place. Even if you don’t attend an organized formal service, or if you don’t do organized religion of any kind, it is important to find the time in your regular routine to check in with that part of yourself that’s not all about yourself. Going to your particular ‘church’ and understanding ‘Church’ as it relates to your masculinity is as important as a prostate exam. You might be uncomfortable at first, but after probing around, you will feel much more at ease knowing that you’ve really got a handle on what’s going on in there.
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a pivotal day in the history of the Civil Rights movement in America. Although it had been conceived before (reference is made in the film Brother Outsider to a plan in the 1940’s for a march of this nature) it was the first time any demonstration of this magnitude had ever come together in this country. A mixing of races and religions and economic backgrounds came together and stood united in demonstration of the need for change for one specific demographic sector…black people.
These kinds of demonstrations aren’t so simple now. As we progressed from the era of fighting for the rights of one marginalized population, other groups began to find their voices in the song of freedom. Women, Gays and Lesbians, Latinos, Asian Americans, people with disabilities, Jews, Muslims, Atheists. But eventually people started to realize as well that they weren’t just part of one group. We used to joke (before political correctness) that if you were a black Jewish lesbian in a wheelchair, you had the ultimate minority status. But we don’t make those jokes anymore; in fact, we are starting to see the value of recognizing what a black, Jewish, disabled lesbian would represent in the mix. She would represent the degree to which we all sit at intersections of cultures, demographics and social standings. Each of us has privilege; each of us has disadvantage. The Civil Rights Movement ushered in an age of self identity that has now culminated in all of us finding multiple self identities.
As we look back on the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, the brilliance of Bayard Rustin’s organizing and the willingness of the people to buy into the effort and gather en-masse during a weekday, it does seem clear that somethings have definitely changed. But it is also clear that some things have not really changed at all. People have died for a cause who’s banners would be just as relevant today. A white man can kill a black man and walk free. We talk about how demographics are shifting to make people of color the majority in this country by 2050; but that kind of binary based demographic still leaves white people as the “norm” or the barometer against which everyone else is measured. Change…but the same.
Progress…real progress, will mean a time when we are able to look at the world through something other than the binary lens: black/white; gay/straight; male/female; rich/poor; able/disabled. We will look at each other as hearts and minds and we will look at life and maybe even God as a continuum…a spectrum of experience. We will have no need for demographics because we will no longer be judging each other. We will fully embrace our selves as black lesbian disabled Jews and our society will actually not raise an eyebrow when it is asked to embrace us back.
But over all, my point is, this day, in 1963 is when it began. Certainly others fought hard before and after this date, but it is the one date we can point to when we know that at least 250,000 other people were thinking pretty much the same thing: “we need to do something about this mess.”
Today is also my friend Stacey’s birthday…in fact at the exact moment when those 250,000 people were gathered on the National Mall, when Martin Luther King, Jr. declared “I Have a Dream”, while Mahaila Jackson sang “How I Got Over,” Stacey sent her first cry to the heavens. And although both Mahalia and Dr. King are gone, Stacey is still here and still crying to the heavens, singing jazz. In 50 years, she has changed of course…as we all have, yet she is the same; just like this country, just like our dreams for justice and equality for all.
So, today, rather than lamenting how much things are the same after 50 years, let’s celebrate what is good about those things that haven’t changed…our basic desire for honesty, humanity and humility; our basic desire for good. Our need to see the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. Our God given talents and gifts that lift one another up and unite us as one people to declare that we ALL have a dream; and of course the fact that we are still singing jazz. For without dreams, whether they be great or small, what else do we have to live for?
Sam Rohrer, president of the Pennsylvania Pastors’ Network, stated that he was “stunned at [the decisions on DOMA and Prop 8] today to take a 360-degree turn away from the biblical definition of marriage.…we must continue to work to keep marriages and families intact, the way God intended them, and pray for a continued revival of the values upon which this country was founded,” said Rohrer.1
When I was 15 years old I created a 2 and a half foot tall statue of Marilyn Monroe. It was quite an engineering feat: there she was in all of her youthful voluptuousness striding forward supported on nothing more than two strappy sandal, stiletto high heels. I determined that once dried and kilned, she would balance perfectly. Her curves, her expression her pose evoked a totally different era for womanhood…both good and bad. Tragically, she exploded in the kiln due to unseen air pockets throughout. That’s what I think of as I watch Paula Deen’s demise and it is also what I think of when I watch some of the conservative Christian reaction to the demise of DOMA and Prop 8.
Poor Paula. She doesn’t understand why people get upset when she uses the word ‘nigger’ when she is angry or threatened or why having it as a part of her personal vocabulary is seen as…uh, questionable. But then this shouldn’t be surprising coming from a woman who was fully willing to recreate a “Gone With the Wind” era South, complete with black slave help, for someone’s wedding2.
But remember, Paula Deen has always been this way; we’re just finding out about it. We still lapped up every dollop of butter she served and bought every book and laughed with her when she was brained by a ham. So what’s so different now. Well, now we know.
So what do Paula Deen and Conservative Christians against Marriage Equality have in common? A lot more than meets the swollen ham eye. Although statements like Sam Roher’s and pretty much anything Michelle Bachmann has ever said, are just plain offensive, they point to a deeper more restrictive concept of religion than the one they are touting as being solely for married heterosexual couples and couples in waiting (aka their offspring) in much the same way that Paula Deen’s claim that ‘nigger’ is a fun expression is a sign of a deeper set of flaws. These limited religious factions have decided that there is only one God, and only one interpretation of God not to mention deciding for everyone that there IS a God. Last time I checked, most Atheists didn’t quite run that way, Hindus are creeped out by that kind of limitation in the concept of existence, Pagans question “just one?”,and well, us Unitarian Universalists don’t accept anything that hasn’t been decided by committee.
Before MB makes a statement like:
Marriage was created by the hand of God. No man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted….For thousands of years of recorded human history, no society has defended the legal standard of marriage as anything other than between man and woman. Only since 2000 have we seen a redefinition of this foundational unit of society in various nations.3
If you didn’t navigate away and look at Reb Jeff’s article on marriage (from 2012 but effective nonetheless) he basically says that the Bible just doesn’t lay it out that clearly. He also brings up American law that only in the last 100 years gave married women ANY rights at all to their own property…largely because they were property themselves.
And Lord knows Michelle might be pretty confused by some of the “ins and outs” of Kosher sex…particularly where it says that the woman may not withhold sex or it is grounds for divorce.4
If the conservative Christians are not willing to accept even the twisted and conflicting language of their own Bible, do we really believe that they are going to take the time to truly accept Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, Zoroastrians, Shinto or any tribal religions? The framework that Roher, Bachmann et al are using is to declare Protestant Christianity the official national religion of the United States. I will not argue that Protestant Christianity is what the dominant population who founded this country practiced. But that same dominant population also practiced and perpetuated slavery, genocide, dowry rituals, marital rape, incest (first cousin marriage is still legal in 20 US states5) blood letting, and more recently pre-frontal lobotomies, thalidomide, ‘hygenic’ circumcision, silicone breast implants and anti-miscegenation. Not a great track record.
In the world of Bachmann, church is on Sunday, sex is in missionary position (appropriately named), marriage equals babies, people are either white or something else and God is God. The terrifying part is that there are an awful lot of people in America who think this same way on some level, just like Paula Deen ignorantly accepts ‘nigger’ as a form of endearment (and she is definitely no rapper.) The repulsion to same sex marriage is just the tip of the iceberg here. This is a group of people that does not want to see beyond their limited view and gay marriage is the current whipping boy. After 9/11 Muslims got their wrath (and still carry it.) Next year, there will be a new ‘other’ for them to be afraid of. Prior to 1967, it was interracial marriage and before that integration in general and throughout our history any kind of immigrants. These are all assaults on diversity and our rights to seek independent truth.
I return to my ill fated Marilyn statue, beautiful in some ways though she was, she could never have survived…and that is a good thing; let her rest in peace with all the conflict of talent, honest womanhood and male objectification and victimization she has come to represent. Similarly, we need to see the limited thinkers who invoke the US founding fathers to foist their beliefs on the rest of us just for what they are: perilously constructed statues of dead icons, waiting to self destruct in the kiln of modern justice.
“The Common Good” is the first of two sermons being debuted at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento this summer, June 23 & August 4. I decided to post this sermon partly in response to the irrational and misguided ignorance of the United States Supreme Court in their decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. I have never seen a more clear example of narrow perception entirely changing someone’s world view and how the white male, heterosexual dominated concept of “common good” has a catastrophic strangle hold on our country. Despite the lives lost over the years and the continuing restrictions on voting placed on non privileged and predominantly brown people in this country, four white men (and ‘Uncle’ Clarence) have decided that we’re done with Civil Rights.
They have unleashed an unthinkable fury.
***
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
When I was in rehearsal for the Broadway show Ragtime, the Musical back in 1996, the whole performing cast had the good fortune to work closely with the creative team. It was a heady experience working with the likes of E.L. Doctorow, Terrence McNallly, choreographer, Graciella Danielle; director, Frank Galati; composer, Stephen Flaherty and lyricist, Lynn Ahrens. Not many people realized it but, Lynn Ahrens wrote many of the School House Rock tunes and lyrics including the “Preamble”…not the actual Preamble but the TV song. I had some wonderful conversations with her about the craft of songwriting. As a lyricist myself, I was very eager to share with her how much her music (prior to creating award winning shows like Ragtime, Once on This Island and Lucky Stiff) had meant to me as a very young person who was fascinated by communicating through song. I told her that the “Preamble” was one of the tunes that I hummed constantly as a child and always looked forward to during my Saturday morning cartoons. It was as a result of hearing catchy commercial music like this as well as studying the classics and a host of other music that led me to actually doing a show like Ragtime. She was of course, flattered. What is interesting to me now, however, is that there I was talking to her about the preamble of the United States Constitution, a paragraph that, although it has no real legal meaning, sets up the entirety of the rest of the Constitution as an instrument designed for the common good. Yet, the show we were working on, Ragtime, was about the very different perceptions of what the common good actually is; how one person because of their sex, religion or race or social status, can experience the world as a very different set of outcomes entirely. Ragtime is a musical about how different the common good looks to different people and how ill fitting the American dream really can be and the sacrifices that are made emotionally, culturally and even spiritually to live into that dream.
I was recently reading the book, Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness. The author, Sharon Salzberg shares a great deal about her own experience with discovering and embracing Buddhism. I am struck by the clarity of her writing and I expect I will enjoy putting the book into action…not that it is an instruction manual on Buddhism, but rather a guide toward discovering ways to be genuinely happy through meditation and focus. However, there is another part of me that is puzzled. Salzberg, like many Westerners, traveled to the East to seek spiritual enlightenment, specifically through Buddhism. This is something we hear a lot about, and we see a great deal right here in the Bay Area…Westerners embracing Buddhism. I wonder, why don’t we hear about people coming from the East seeking spiritual enlightenment here in the states…seeking it from Christianity…Judaism…Unitarian Universalism? No, instead, we hear about people coming here in search of wealth, or ways to learn how to be more wealthy. That says a lot. Why is this such a one way street? Is it that the spiritual grass is that much greener? Is Buddhism that much “better?” I am not raising this question to at all be critical of Buddhism or those seeking/ practicing Buddhism. I am just asking, rhetorically, what is missing in our own Western based spiritual practices that leaves us lacking?
Have we considered that it may not be lacking at all?
Consider this, every religion and spiritual practice seeks to do the same thing: make sense out of existence. Whether that is to prepare us for the afterlife, death, or birth, or give us tools to sustain adversity, to give us hope, to build community, all of it is aimed at satisfying the answer to the perpetual “why?” Even the lack of spiritual practice, even the determined belief that this is all we’ve got here and now, is a way of processing how we are in our existence. It is human nature to ask “why” and that, as I see it, is about the only real common good that we can legitimately pursue: finding a personally satisfying explanation for the question “why life?”
Westerners traveling East to find “Truth.” Odd thing, so if on a certain basic level we are all seeking the same thing, why would someone have to go to East to find truth? What’s to say we aren’t able to attain the same level of enlightenment through our own Western traditions? Are they that tainted? Or are we? Why should we have to learn someone else’s ways to find enlightenment. The human animal, regardless of where they are, seeks peace in its heart. It seeks oneness with existence. In our largely Judeo Christian shaped Western world, we actually have the same goal of peace, enlightenment and truth as any Buddhist or Muslim, but we suffer from uniquely Western challenges of life. But Buddhists, Muslims and everyone else also suffers from their own unique challenges of life. No human is perfect and no human is outwardly the same. What binds us together is a sameness of inner purpose…not a sameness of outward practice. If the purpose is linked to our being human and not how we are human, then it stands to reason that we should be able to find that “truth” within; regardless of how we choose to practice that truth.
I like to study anthropology in my spare time…genetics and human migrations. It amazes me that humans who exist with no knowledge of one another all come up with the same stuff. On a biological level, we all eat and secrete, we all procreate and die, but then also on a spiritual level, we all stand in awe of things we can’t explain and we seek an answer…whether that be through faith or science or both or neither. I love the fact that many scientists are actually deeply spiritual just for this reason. Ancient drawings, statues, language…all of these attest to the inner sameness of the human animal. This is the reason every culture has ritual and spiritual practices and sometimes what we call religion. There is a human tendency toward humility for our existence that wants to package that immense knowledge into something that is comprehensible; the real common good.
I try not to be the black guy who gets up and always talks about being black; and I don’t believe that conversations about race are all about black and white. But I’m going to go there to demonstrate a related point. I cannot stand the expression “post racial.” It implies that we have “overcome” and hints at a job well done for everyone who was fighting through the sixties and seventies…yay, its all over now. Many achievements have been made admittedly, but the same attitudes that created slavery in America still exist. Slavery wasn’t created out of meanness. Slavery was created out of ignorance and selfishness…and a sense of inherent superiority. The assumed cultural superiority that created that disparity is still evident in advertising, public policy and pretty much everything else in this country that continues to live by a government and Constitution that was created by wealthy white men in a time long gone. The more I study politics, I believe we will not ever be able to claim a cultural position in the United States of being “post racial” unless we are willing to give up the foundation of our government and start again by including all of the voices that make up the population. My generation (Generation X) in the United States is the generation of deconstruction; we think…often too much. Wedged between technology and the death of religion, civil and human rights and Reaganomics, we saw the world of the 60’s and 70’s spun completely out of control (my apologies to the Baby Boomers) and reaching adulthood said, quite simply, enough. The words “post racial” are part of that spinning out of control “oh, we worked so hard, so there must be a result, right?” There is indeed a result, but its not that easy.
Again, I am put off by calling something “post racial.” For me “post racial” conjures up language like “color blindness” or believing that people of all races are the same or leveling the playing field. I don’t want to leave my cultural, racial-isms behind…If I do, what does that leave me? You see, the problem with the concept of “post racial” as it is largely presented is that it is based on a white Western concept of “commonality” which is fine if you are white and Western but rather lacking if you aren’t. There is this assumption in “post racial” that my unique racial-ness can and WANTS to be blended into the concept of the “melting pot” and that this will be for the “common good.” But that is the same assumption that told me to straighten my hair. It is the same assumption that told me to be a lawyer or doctor or banker. It is the same assumption that says I should want a heterosexual modeled relationship. But no, those priorities still leave one group calling the shots. Ask the descendants of the Nisenan people, the Southern Madiu people, the Valley Miwok and Me-Wuk people, the Patwin people, the Wintun People and the Wintu people any of the indigenous people of the land we are sitting on now. Ask an Australian Aboriginal…ask different people what their “common good” represents and you will get very different answers.
The way in which we need most to become “post racial” isn’t by becoming “post racial” at all. It is by becoming “post colonial”…letting go of a colonial Western centered world view. When you look at indigenous people living off of the land or in nomadic tribes, do you see someone who has “less” or do you see someone living their truth? When you see Shinto ritual, do you see primitive religion, or do you see honest insight into the heart of a culture? News flash: some people not only want to live in villages, but they don’t understand why we don’t want to live close to our multiple generations and instead choose to cocoon ourselves in homes where we have so much “space” that we rarely see our children. Some people don’t actually want to support endeavors that use money to make money. Some people don’t want to be rich or even have any major stake in what our financial system is about, just ask some of our homeless populations. Yes, we all need water, but at the cost of displacing people? We all need clothing, but at the cost of modern slavery and the serious threat to health? Are money and wealth and “prosperity” bad? It really depends on who is pushed out of the way or manipulated to create that wealth. And it definitely depends on who is defining what “wealth” really is.
In certain social justice circles there is a lot of talk today about “equity” and “sustainability” and “resilience.” But to what end? Equity…so we can all have two leased cars a home with a mortgage and raise children who will spend 40 years working just so they can afford to retire? Who decided that our “American Way of Life” was such a good thing? I actually don’t understand why we should have to live a lifestyle where we need to take 2 weeks of vacation. If we were actually living in balance with what our bodies and minds and communities need, we would have no need for vacation. We might actually live in balance with the seasons and also be able to embrace the shifts in ourselves from one time of life to the next, from day to day and from hour to hour. There would be no retirement, because there would be an important role in the community waiting for us as elders and everyone in the community would want to support that role and all the other natural roles that are part of our human way of being.
The world that we…that’s you and me, people over the age of 40 have created, has reached a saturation point. We cannot sustain any more useless attorneys. We cannot build any more hospitals for rich people, and staff them with professionals who look at medicine as a profit centered business. We cannot create any more schools of “higher learning” that are jammed with students who have to wait until someone else dies so that they can get a job. We cannot pump any more pollution into the earth. We cannot make our way of governing and our stewardship of the land we stole any more complicated. We cannot keep doing this. The next generations see it clear as a bell. And although they love us, I do believe they are perfectly willing to let us charge headlong off the cliff…letting us die in the mess that we have created…because this world of capitalist pursuit without consequence does not suit THEIR common good.
Let me close by bringing this back around to our faith. In his Berry Street Lecture “There’s a Change A-comin’” last year, Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Muir criticized what he calls the “iChurch” and rabid individualism among Unitarian Universalists. It is a fascinating and delicious talk, but I caution against the negative framing of the Apple industries “i” in that the next stewards of our existence have a very different view of that little letter and the technology it represents. Instead, I think it is more a question of whether we belong to a “we-ligion” or a “me-ligion?” I see ME-ligion as the faith practice that is purely driven by individual goals and desires and the individual truth. We see this a lot. Some of those same people who have gone abroad seeking Buddhism or other enlightenment come squarely from this space. As do some people who experienced oppression in the name of other traditions they grew up with and carry that damage looking for healing and self reconciliation. This is an important part of Unitarian Universalism that is even lifted up in our fourth principle “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” There is nothing wrong with self awareness. But taken to an extreme, ME-ligion begins to assume that everyone is doing the same self centered practice. WE-ligion on the other hand has the potential to acknowledge the identity of the self, while pointing more toward our sixth principle “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Humility. Here I believe is one place where we start to point toward that truth, that real “common good” that I speak of. It is a common good that is small and simple enough to acknowledge that life and existence, however we experience it or explain it on a personal level, was here before us, is greater than us and will go on after us. Yet it is a common good that is spacious enough for us to be our whole selves beyond the imaginary boundaries of “states” or the history of slavery and genocide, and allows us to access what is at our unique cores outside of Western contexts. It is a common good that will enable the next generations to reclaim what it means to be truly human and wrest it from the priorities established in a monochromatic, monophonic world dominated by a handful of cultures who were motivated by fear. And they will replace it with love. Let us help them. May it be so
