Celebrating Holidays

This is the time of the year that the controversies break out about whether Christmas should not be publicly celebrated or whether "all holidays" should be celebrated.   I definitely understand that the way Christmas has been celebrated in the US for certainly hundreds of years has been an insensitive and oppressive way of treating a majority religion like it is everyone's religion and posing it as the "norm".    However, I think to go in the direction of celebrating no holidays is to deny the cultural richness of this nation and to impoverish us all.

I think there is something useful that can be done in the direction of celebrating all holidays - however as a friend pointed out to me today that also has to be done with cultural sensitivity and awareness.  I'm not suggesting we try to all celebrate rituals that are not ours - but I am suggesting we recognize they exist and show respect and appreciation for what they represent.  Christians often attempt to give Jewish people "equal airtime" by recognizing Hanukkah which in reality is a very minor Jewish holiday which happens to fall closest to the biggest Christian holiday.  At the same time Christians commonly schedule meetings and other important business events on what is the most important Jewish holiday which is in the fall in either Sept or Oct.   Rosh Hashanah is the first day of a 10 day period of repentant and atonement for personal and national sins.  Can you imagine how the US would be affected if we even for a moment considered what our "national sins" might be and were willing to be humble (let alone atone for them)?

Muslims have two different significant holidays (well Christians have Christmas and Easter).  Both are on Islamic Lunar calendars and so they shift around.  Eid Al-Fitr is celebrated at the end of Ramadan (a month of fasting during daylight hours in May or June), and Muslims usually give zakat (charity) on the occasion.  Ramadan is intended to deepen compassion and faith in God. Eid Al-Adha, the holiest of Muslim holidays, is celebrated on the tenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah and lasts for four days falling generally in Mid June through the end of Aug, during which Muslims usually sacrifice a sheep and distribute its meat in 3 parts: among family, friends, and the poor.  It is about the willingness to make sacrifices and be faithful even when what is asked of us may seem too much or too hard, and how God's purpose may surprise us.  Again what if US people considered the values of compassion, and faithfulness.   These are not values we generally focus on.

The Buddhists have many sacred days and they vary slightly in different Buddhist countries as well.  But Vesak, the birth of Buddha is the most important, also on a lunar calendar it falls in May.  Like the celebration of the birth of Jesus this celebration focuses on the story of his life and refocusing on the 8 precepts - that which Buddha taught. Follows are not to kill on this day (no eating of meat) and release animals and insects as part of a ceremonial focus on liberation.   Not to sound like a broken record but what if Americans reflected for a day on non-violence and on liberation of those who are not free?  It would seem a great improvement of our national character.

I could go on pointing out the holidays of various religions but you get the idea.  What if we had tv shows, symbols, talks about these holidays on the days they were celebrated?  What if we had flex time that allowed people of what ever faith to have their most important holiday off?  What if we actually had these on our calendars so we knew when they were? What if we considered these values in the cycle of our year - not in celebrating rituals that are not ours but in considering the values behind them?   
I have loved that our nation at least reflects on gratitude during Thanksgiving (but needs to lose the mythology as to why - which is a perverse rewrite of our oppression of the Native people who lived here before us).  It has led me to consider what values I wish our country celebrated and to consider creating traditions with friends and family that do uphold other values.  For example, I have long thought I should have a "cooperation day" celebration.  (In my head everyone would bring a soup ingredients and collectively make a soup and while it was stewing cooperate on some craft project which would be donated afterwords to the poor.  Since we have national holidays in Jan, Feb, April, May, July, Aug, Oct, Nov and Dec.  I have believed this holiday should be celebrated in June.

Stories of Faithfulness

What are the stories we tell about our own lives?  I have just been through a 4 day run of going to various different story telling events from hearing several Native American story telling styles to just a story jam where people told their stories.  I was asked why I as a therapist who spends many, many hours of the week listening to people why I would during free time listen to more stories of people?  The answer is that I am interested in how we tell our own stories…the meaning we put on events and whether or how we notice the presence of the spirit in our lives.  I am also fascinated by the ways in which our lives are interconnected, woven into a web even when we don’t know it.  

This weekend I heard three stories that were told in very different settings by people who did not know each other that speak to the amazing way the Divine connects us to each other for the purpose of healing.   The first story was simply one of how a woman was reached out to over the internet by someone who had been the Goddaughter of her Father.  This was significant to her since she never knew her father who left her mother right after she was born.   The woman told her she had some family pictures and mailed to her photos of her parent’s engagement and honeymoon.  It was surprising and yet healing to look at these pictures and discover that her parents had clearly been in love.  (A thought that had not occurred to her since she had only known her divorced and embittered mother.)

The next story came from a doctor told about a time when he was in residency and during his rotation in the emergency room.   He woke up on a Monday morning at 2am from a nightmare in which a young woman had come in having an asthma attack and despite everything they did to try to help her she had died unable to breath.   He was so upset by this dream that he went to the Pulmonologist asking to be instructed on all emergency steps he could take if someone in ER could not breathe. He told the Sr Doctor that he felt certain he would be faced with this situation.  The doctor felt busy and did not see the point of this and put him off till “tomorrow”.   He put him off every day for 3 days.  Finally on the 4^th day the Resident insisted the doctor make the time to tell him stating that we have used up all the waiting time.   As he began explaining the doctor did sort of get into it and the Resident was able to make a careful step by step list of options to try which ended with “and if none of that works you will have to call me, we will have to operate immediately and put her on an artificial lung”.

Within the next 16 hours a young 21 year old woman was brought into ER by her parents, unable to breathe.  The young resident followed carefully the step by step instructions that he had and nothing worked.   She was down to only 4% oxygenation level.  People die at 3%.   He called the Pulmonologist who indeed had to operate quickly and put her on an artificial lung.  Only because the resident had known exactly what to do and had tried everything quickly was there enough time to get the Pulmonologist in there and they saved her life.   Her parents were extremely grateful and then said: “It is the strangest thing our daughter actually had a dream Monday night where she dreamt that she had an asthma attack so severe that she could not breath at all.”   The resident asked what time she has this dream and was told at 2am in the morning.

  

It strikes me that only God can make an intervention like this.  Both parties, who did not know each other, were armed with the knowledge to save the young womans’ life.  What an act of faith it was for this non-religious resident doctor to believe his own dream.  It strikes me that our very lives may depend upon the faithfulness of strangers.

In a remarkably similar vein another story I heard this weekend was from a Native American man in his 50’s.   He told that in his twenties he was so ruined and desolate from his experience in the Residential Schools that he wandered for a decade drunk and homeless till a powerful native healer had come to him.   She had gone on a vision quest and when emerging from a sweatlodge an image of a small 5 year old boy who had grown up with straight water on one side and curved water on the other side (an accurate description of his Washington birthplace).   She also got that he had been damaged and that he needed her to find and heal him in order that he could do a great work for his people.  She searched for 3 years.  Finally one day she found him on the street hung over and dirty.   She sent him to shower in her hotel room and gave him clean clothes to put on.   They talked about his life and she spent two years on his healing.  He has been sober ever since. He also has worked to support other native youth and now to help Native people to stop the fossil fuel projects that threaten our future.

Again in this story I am amazed by the faithfulness of this native medicine woman to believe she could find grown up, a man who she had seen only as a vision of as a boy. She had the faith that the vision was real and that she could find him with virtually no clues or directions.   I am awed that she had the dedication to persisted for three years till she found him and two more years through his healing.   I am again struck that only God can plant such visions.   And from the small act of making sure someone gets some photos, to the medium act of being a pest till you get the expert answers you need, to dedicating of years and years to the healing of another.  It is so clear how deeply we are all connected to each other and how critical a difference our faithfulness makes in the lives of others.

What have you heard? Have you been faithful to it?  How has God used you for the healing of others?

Your Evolutionary Question

When the Celestine Prophecy, a spiritual novel by James Redfield, came out in 1993, it was widely read by spiritual types.  I however somehow did not read it till 2006.  I loved the various spiritual insights and truths he shared in the form of prophecies that the main characters were finding from thousands of year's old scrolls.  But the most fascinating part for me was his encounter with a priest, Father Sanchez who teaches him about the 6th insight, and in so doing also helps him to identify his evolutionary question.  For most people who have read this book when I mention the evolutionary question this has gone right by them and they don't remember it at all.  For me it is the most important part of the book.   Perhaps this is because I am also a therapist and I'm so impressed with how it weaves family of origin material with our being able to understand our spiritual purpose in life.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about the idea of chosing our parents.  Redfield also works with this idea and in the encounter between the main character and Father Sanchez, the priest guides him at looking at the qualities of each his parents, their sort of motto in life or stance towards it, what he learned from each, and what was the unfinished business of their lives.  From this broad over view the Priest helps him notice that he has woven these bits from his parents together into a spiritual question that he has chosen this life time to pursue and to work with.  This is called one's "evolutionary question" (because when we pursue it we grow.)  In a handbook Redfield wrote to accompany the book he has a series of questions designed to also help people identify these influences which shaped their journey.  Interestingly in Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects there is one exercise entitled: My Choices in this Life Time which coming from a Buddhist perspective of reincarnation also posits that we have chosen the conditions of this life time and that we have chosen them to prepare us for the spiritual work that we are here to do.  I have in my practice developed a way to help people identify in two to three sessions what their evolutionary question is.

What a marvelous compass to have, to have a really big perspective on the events of our lives and the influences of our parents in shaping our spiritual purpose in life.   What an amazing thing to walk conscious knowing that you indeed have a spiritual purpose and to be able to cleave closely to it.  I have found that when one knows what it is, it is possible to ask on a daily or weekly or monthly basis where you are at with your question - to return to it a guiding force and a clarifier about the current experiences one is having and the decisions that you have before you.  What is your evolutionary question?

The Mother's within us

My daughter never knew my Mother.  She had died decades before my daughter was born. On a few occasions during her childhood she showed curiosity or tried to ask me about my mother, what she was like, etc.  That is a very hard kind of question to answer.  While we can give some superficial kinds of descriptors of another person, it is very hard to describe the breadth and depth of another persons personality and energy in the word.

When my daughter turned 11 she started babysitting.  It was an amazing and powerful experience to watch her in action, to see a maternal energy coming out of this one who was so recently a young child herself.  It was a little like when she first started talking and I felt like a curtain was pulled back and I suddenly knew what her mind was like, how she thought.   As I watched her with children there was this odd dejavue experience.   I partly recognized my own parenting style coming through her, but also I would have to say, I also recognized the way my mother was with children coming through her.

Science has now come to understand that from the moment we are born we carry the eggs inside us that will one day be our children.  On some sort of mysterious level those eggs "hear" or experience everything their mothers experience.   There is now in fact evidence of multi-generational trauma that is carried in our DNA.  I would like to believe there is also multi-generational joy and love that is also carried in our DNA.

In the past year or so it occurred to me finally to say to my daughter:  "You remember when you asked me what my mother is like?"  She nodded.  "You already know.  You have already met her in the many ways I carry her in my being and my way of being."  So on this Mother's Day, it does not matter if your Mother is dead or hundreds and hundreds of miles away.   She is with you.

This is my Mother holding my sister with me looking on.

For those of you who know me and my daughter you will 

note that genes do repeat!

Counting our Blessings

I see with bemusement as I look back over my past 3 posts here that my "new idea" for this post echos the themes of the past 3.   Well sometimes we must look at things from many angles to get something.

In the work of Joanna Macy she starts with Gratitude and then goes into grief for the world, then seeing with new perspective and then into taking action. In a couple of previous posts I have written about the book: The Wisdom to Know the Difference, by Eileen Flanagan about using the Serenity prayer to try to discern whether something is a thing we can change or a thing we must accept as is.  And in last month's post I talked about the significant difference in happiness of when people "compare up"  vs when they "compare down".

Today I was reminded by a friend that when we live fighting the reality of the experience we are having, fighting the injustice of it, the way in which it is not what we wanted or dreamed of, that we make ourselves unhappy.  (Similar to comparing up, glass half empty or not having the wisdom to know what we cannot change and must accept.)   My friend reminded me of his own amazing discovery of how to actually be happy while literally in prison for decades.   It starts with gratitude, counting your blessings and being truly happy for what you do in fact have.   In the comparing up mode we discount our blessings seeing them as "normal" and "as it should be" - thus not of importance or value.

All this begs the question of what is in fact changeable.  It is possible to live as if everything we encounter just is, and we have no personal power and must just endeavor to be happy in an injust and immoral society.  I would argue that that way of living is as much a cop out as deciding to me miserable by fighting everything happening in our lives.   It would seem to me that when we can ground in gratitude and learn to be happy there is a slack from which we can see what step might be before us for justice and try to take that step.   If we can take actions for justice from a place of non attachment then we are either devastated or ego stroked by our outcomes.   We are just faithful.

Many years ago a friend wrote me around Thanksgiving time that she was playing the "Thanksgiving game" on a daily basis.   This was a woman who was in grave danger of loosing her eyesite entirely, but she was noticing what to be thankful for each day.   I notice another one of my Facebook Friends, a climate activist is posting something she is grateful for each day.  These are inspiring examples to me of people remembering to count their blessings.

Fish tails and other tales of beauty

Over a dozen years ago someone sent me the quote: "An idealist is someone who is always homesick for a place they have never been".   I relate to this quote immediately because I have been homesick my whole life for the Kin-dom of God: for a place where Justice rolls down like rain, where love is practiced with abandonment, and where kindness and equity run hand in hand, and where community is a way of being. It has been very painful at times to not live there.

But recently I have been thinking that I have been approaching this the wrong way.  Happiness studies show that people who compare "up" are unhappy, and that people who compare "down" are.   This is another way of saying do you see the glass half empty or half full.  But I think of the story of a man in a Nazi concentration camp (I believe Victor Frankl) who was served a bowl of soup that had a bit of fish tail in it, and as the light hit the scales and reflected off in a sort of rainbow way he marveled and rejoiced over the sheer beauty he saw.   When I first heard that story many years ago I was sort of stunned that anyone in such a horrible and oppressive situation could find any comfort or joy while in such a setting.   And it seemed hard for me to understand that such a "small" beauty could do it for him.    But now I am aware of how often people who are in the last weeks of their lives talk about how love and beauty or the only things that really matter.

I had a weird day in which their were various frustrating things, and opportunities to feel discouraged or annoyed.  But if I am honest there was also the opportunity to notice an amazing couple who had adopted numerous special needs kids, or a whole group of people just trying hard even as they perhaps miss the mark, or a moment looking out on the Sound where the water was all shimmery and the sun was hitting it in a way where it just looked like a thousand diamonds.  I realize maybe the Kin- dom of God is not some magnificent place of perfection that I can never quite get to, maybe it is just these small moments over and over again.

Living into Impotence

I suspect this title will not excite people about reading this post and for men may even seem a bit ominous.  But I ask you to read on.

I am middle aged.  I have lived long enough to see that not everything we try for do we get.  I have lived long enough to also learn that you can warn people about dangers and snares that you know about personally, but they have to learn from their own experience.  I have lived long enough to learn that all set backs are not permanent, but neither are all victories.  I have experienced many loses in my life, starting very young, and I have learned that there are loses that cannot be recouped, out run or redone - they simply must be accepted.   Accepted not as a defeat, but as sand inside an oyster, and some as compost for the plants that are coming.

In the book: The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Difference and When to Let Go. by Eileen Flanagan she takes the serenity prayer and talks about how we come to terms with it.   She notes among other things that most of us are naturally pulled in one direction or the other with it.  I certainly recognized for myself that I am pulled to take courage and try to change things..even things like national policy.  But one of Eileen's points was that we do have to discern when we need to go the other direction which in my case means when to find serenity by accepting things as they are.  I don't recall if this is in her book but to believe that we can change anything is in fact a form of idolatry.  It is to believe that we have God like powers.

In a society racked with injustice, and in this country at this moment in history, this would seem an almost impossible task how to be at peace with the world as it is.  As a person who is actively working to stop climate change and who is surrounded by other climate change activists who often feel quite frantic about, as joked yesterday: "Repent the world is coming to an end" type feelings.  I have learned even with climate change to hold it in spirit.   I hold it with a spirit of curiosity, knowing that I do not know how things will turn out.  I have learned with great difficulty to practice non-attachment around the outcome.  Sometimes I cannot tell if it is simply a slick form or bargaining or denial.   But it seems like there is some peace from saying both in the face of hopeful signs and in the sign of terrible signs  "I don't know what will happen."

I was so pleased when Wen Stephenson's book: What we are Fighting for now is Each Other, came out.  I have not read the book yet.  I just love the title.   It summed up for me that I cannot be fighting for the outcome but I can always act for Love - the love of Life, the love of the planet and all those on it.  I can notice the spiritual practice of non-attachment to outcomes that Buddhism preaches.  The Truth is I don't know what will happen; none of us do.  As I write this the Lacy Dalton song is singing: "listen to the wind,  The only thing you can trust is change."  This also summarizes the form of detachment I am talking about.

As a therapist for 23 years now I have had ringside seats at many disasters.   Some that my clients were fighting as hard as they could.  Others that even as I gently tried to question or discourage they went towards like moth to the flame.   But there is nothing like being a therapist to teach you that you are not in charge of other people's lives, you are simply a witness.  Hopefully a loving and constructive or supportive witness, but a witness none the less.  This then becomes its own spiritual practice of learning to keep handing it back to God even as you pray for others.   and yes to keep breathing into your own impotence, to meet the limits of what you can do, or what you should do, to surrender again and still keep your heart open, feel the pain, release the pain, and then do it again.

Joanna Macy likes to ask the question: What have you allowed to break your heart?  To break your heart open?  This spiritual practice of living into impotence is not for the feint of heart, but it is a powerful spiritual practice.   It is is not the same, at all, as giving up or becoming hopeless or helpless. Because inside of this practice is really the turning towards the strength of God, and the wisdom of eternity.  Recently I have heard both Native people and a famous civil rights leader say: "We have been here before and we will be here again, we know who we are and we are not giving up".   There own familiarity with suffering gives them strength, endurance and resilience.  Impotence is about being without power but it is also about how you live into that.  Do you live into it as a loss, a humiliation, a defeat, or do you live into it with humility, serenity and hope?  Do you live into it alone, isolated on your own terms or do you live into it with Grace and Presence?

The Ocean of Non-attachment

I am at the ocean. Yes, in January.   I recommend it.  Divorced from laying in the sun or running in the waves there is an even clearer sense of the eternal majesty of the waves and their reminders of the eternal majesty of the Divine.

For me there are spiritual practices associated with the ocean.   One is the practice of non-attachment.   Buddhist monks have a practice of spending days painstakingly making beautiful Mandala designs out of different colored sands.   Then after their careful work is completed they ceremonially destroy the work.  This is a ritual expression of non-attachment and the impermanence of all things.

Long ago when my daughter was small we would come to this same place and we would enjoy making a sandcastle and then we would watch the tide come in and destroy it.   Later with her stepfather and her step brother we would build an even bigger one with an extensive moat system and we would race to complete it before the incoming tide would come for it.   We would play at defending it, and then finally stand back and watch its ultimate destruction.   A reminder that nothing man made is actually permanent or stands against the sands of time.  After my divorce, I came and built a sand castle just to watch it wash away, just to acknowledge the years of work I had put into the marriage and then to release it.  There is a funny kind of peace I cannot properly explain about knowing that in the end it all, everything we do, returns to the ocean.

There is another beach ritual that goes hand in hand with this.  It is the throwing of the rocks in the ocean.   Some year when I was full of angst and troubles I stood watching the crashing waves and the majesty of God.  I began to pick up rocks and name them for the troubles of my year, and then to “give them to God” by throwing them into the ocean.  I would do this till I could think of nothing more to throw in.  I would leave feeling lighter - emptied.  I value the practice so much I often recommend it to clients  to release  grief or anger.

I remember one year I picked a particularly big rock to throw in to represent a whole ordeal I had gone through for more than a year.  I happened to throw it right as a gigantic wave came and even though I backed up to not get water in my shoes the wave brought that rock back and deposited at my feet!  I said:  “I understand God, I am not as done with that one as I wish.  I have not fully let it go.”   And sure enough during the next year, at moments I could feel that thing washing up at my feet again.    I’m happy that this year I am having a year where there is nothing I feel I need to throw in the ocean.  I think I have been learning to throw them into the eternal ocean all year long.