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?

Where is God in Darkness?

I have written in other spaces about my concern that the incoming Trump administration represents the rise of fascism in the US.   This raises interesting spiritual questions about how we respond to destructive things happening around us, where is God in dark times and what does this mean about evil?

Has God abandoned us, or is punishing us by allowing this to happen?
If one holds to the view that God created us with free will then that means that those who are not listening to God are always free to stray from what God might intend for us and to do great destruction or evil.  That evil affects other people.  The price of freedom is a God who is omni-present, but not all powerful.

Where is God in this situation?
God is always present as a source of guidance, comfort, and strength.   It is even more important in crisis to turn to God.  God cannot however stop the suffering caused by others' application of their free will.  Buddhism does have much to say about how we manage suffering.

What does God require of us?
The Bible answers this question of what God requires of us saying:
"To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."  Micah 6:8
I think those spiritual theologies that say we are co-creators of the world we live in and the lives we walk in, also suggest that we are to embrace the highest truth we know and live it.   I think in a time where hatred rises up and causes the scapegoating and targeting of some people that means saying no to that.  I think in a time where violence rises up it means acting with non-violence.  I think in a time where the earth is pillaged, polluted and destroyed it means aligning our life style with an honoring and protecting of the earth (as currently modeled by Native people at Standing Rock).  In a time where there is an increasing assault on free speech, on free press, and on civil liberties it means standing up for those and protecting supporting those others who also speak out.   In a time where vote suppression and gerrymandering threaten our very democracy it means standing up to fight for democracy.   And all of these things mean turning to God for the courage to act for justice.  In short, in a universe where people can do destructive or evil things, we are called upon to speak truth, take action and to hold up the Light of Love.   To remain silent or passive is to passively allow the evil.

Is there no Light in this Darkness?
Neale Donald Walsh has written quite a bit about how it is only the dark that allows us to know the Light.   That the Light longs to be known by us.   Perhaps another way of saying this is that we sometime must struggle in order to learn; contrast is one of the ways by which we learn.  If one believe in reincarnation then we have come to earth in incarnations intended to maximize our learning, and the encounter with darkness or evil is not a detour or a mistake, it is an opportunity for learning, and opportunity to bring forth light.  We are not called to do this alone, it is what community, especially spiritual community is for.

Why is this happening when I don't want it to?
While we may co-create our own personal reality, it is also the case that as a collective humanity, or a society we also create certain shared realities through our shared consciousness. There are lessons we are trying to learn as a collective.  It is worth asking: How could it serve the learning of the American people to grapple with the person of Donald Trump and the type of leadership he is bringing?  It is easy to point fingers of blame at figures in history like Hitler or Trump who are the apparent center of so much darkness, but that really gets all the rest of us off the hook.   We must look at the fear that is always the fertile ground for fascism.   We must examine where we have stood in relationship to fear? We must do the spiritual work of looking at the anger, the pull for easy answers, for power, the arrogance, etc that live within us and are mirrored by Trump, rather than simply demonize him.

How do we respond to this spirituality?
Responding to an already negative situation with more anger, violence or fear only magnifies the negative energy.  Going numb or in denial also does not serve the Light.  Joanna Macy tells the story of the Tibetan Shambala prophecy.   The Tibetan's believe that there comes a time of great darkness and chaos when the world as we know it is completely threatened.   At that time many souls come to earth for one purpose: to fight for our world as Shambala warriors.   They are not intended to fight with normal weapons of violence, but rather with spiritual weapons of wisdom and compassion.   Wisdom brings great clarity and vision, but clarity alone does not bring the passion for action.   Compassion brings great love which can move people to action, but action alone is not productive without clarity or focus.   So they must use wisdom and compassion together to fight for our world.  I believe that this is a time when we all must become Shambala warriors.

Is their an opportunity is this experience?
When lived spiritually all experience contain an opportunity.  Chaos, danger, conflict, destruction.... all of these things carry in them the seeds of change and the possibilities for transformation.   If Hillary Clinton had been elected, most good liberals would have continued to focus little on the situation, even as our planet is threatened by the crisis of climate change, even as racism was literally killing Black people in the streets daily.  When evil becomes as blatant and undeniable as it now is, there is a moral imperative put before us all.  The addition of the Trump administration to the Climate crisis demands we quite literally transform the current power structure or we will die.  So it is time for each of us to reach down to the foundations of our spiritual traditions and see what God calls us to do.

The spirit in God's Creation

Is there a square of earth or a couple of trees that you are in relationship with?  That you know intimately?  In the past 20 years I have lived in 9 or 10 different places, but all within throwing distance of the the same many fingered creek.  I have lived in some houses, and many apartments. I have worked hard to always live and work in places where I could look out at nature and not at another building or a parking lot.  (It is sad that it is work to accomplish that and how many city dwellers cannot see, without going to a park, God's Creation.)

In each place I have come to know when things bloom and what they look like and the rhythm of their cycle of blooming, flourishing and relinquishing for the winter.  I am in relationship with these bits of the earth, and just like the rhythms of my own reproductive cycle grounded me, or the rhythm of day and night, or the cycle of the moon, so too do these cycles.  I have tended fruit trees that demanded that they be harvested on their schedule not mine or the fruit would be spoiled on the ground.   Similarly dandelions in bud demanded action before they would seed and make next years weeding worse.   And invasive weeds let me know that if I did not tend them they would take over and kill everything else.

There is a quiz I took a few years ago.  It asks:
1. On what watershed do you live?
2.  What are five trees native to your state?
3.  What are five native birds?
4.  What are five native flowers?
Sadly most Americans cannot even partially answer these questions.   Partly because we move so often and partly because of how cut off from the earth we are.

The first year I looked out  my apt window at this tree I was completely amused by what happened when the buds opened: it was like party favors burst open. I grew to watch it as a friend.

Recently at my Church retreat we were asked the question is the Light of God in all Life forms?   As someone who scored highest on the belief.net test of religions as a pantheist/pagan this was not a hard question form to answer.

I like this quote from Rachel Carson:  "I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.  I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth."

The often quotes speech of Chief Si' ahl (pronounced Seattle by non-native white people), chief of the Duwamish also speaks to this deep love of place:

 Ever part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.... The White Man will never be alone. 

In the face of climate change I can only stand indited by the above.   I know that in terms of systems theory there are suppose to be feedback loops in every system that are corrective - signs, indicators that cue the system to correct when something is wrong.   But we are so deeply cut off from the earth that we do not even notice the warning signs.   I have been appalled as spring comes several months to early and birds arrive way before they should - that my fellow neighbors simply rejoice at "early spring" rather than hearing the earth's distress.  That our news reporters report forest fires, droughts and record rain and snow storms without ever uttering the word climate change, and we complain about the impacts of these changes, but we do not react with appropriate alarm saying "the earth is sick and what are we going to do about it?"  Many of us live in concrete and steel jungles were we are lucky if we see over manicured grass and a tree stuck in a square in the sidewalk.  How would we see then the miles of pine trees dying from pine beetle disease?  Or the trees that are dying from drought?  People drive by trees being smothered to death by invasive ivy without understanding that there is an invasion happening and a death is occurring in their sight.

Four hundred years ago Descarte taught us that body and mind, man and earth were separate from each other.  The whole western way of structuring society has been built upon this misguided polarity which has also separated our body from our soul - and apparently our souls from the earth upon which our very survival depends!   We have falsely believed we are masters over the earth rather than understanding that we are living cells within a body and that to fail to care for the body will mean our own death.  We have believed that we have the right to cut down trees because they are in our way or because we want to use them.  We have believed we have the right to blow the tops off mountains or  remove the deep recesses of the earth that which is within.  I don't believe in the concept of sin, but if there is such a thing this is what it would be - the desecration of the earth.  Who are we to say that there is not the divine spirit within every molecule of life?  How would we act if we believed that God's spirit dwelt in every living thing on this planet?  How would we act if the life forms around us was our familiar and cherished friends?

Is God Angry?

We know that early cultural tribes often prayed to multiple Gods - often having Gods that represented different aspects of life: war, love, justice, etc.   or in other cases represented the spirit within various aspects of nature: mountains, the ocean, trees, etc.   But under either of these schema natural disasters were viewed as a sign that the God's were angry.  In fact even after cultures increasingly went to Monotheism, the belief in one God, it was believed that God was mad when an earthquake or hurricane or a plague came.   I mean think about it, before one understood what germs were or how they spread how do you make sense of a plague coming to a town and wiping out most of the population?   It would seem arbitrary and cruel...like someone was trying to punish.   Before one could know about the plates underneath the earth shifting and causing earthquakes this too would seem arbitrary and mighty in its power to destroy.   Before one could understand conflicting hot and cold fronts and how they effected water bodies a hurricane would seem crazy - normally the water has predictable tides and now it has risen up in a destroying rage.

By the time we have reached the 21st century, science has become such a force that it can explain many if not most things.   It has increasingly shaped how humans understand our environment and the way our universe works.   It is taught in our schools around the developed world.  It binds us to a common understanding of the world even across language barriers.   In fact some sociologist have postulated that the waning of both church attendance and church influence in certainly the US is because of the rise of science - a fact that has made many fundamentalist churches actively hostile towards science.   Well that and the fact that the religious texts of most religions, written 2,000 some years ago reflect the scientific understanding of that era about the earth, and thus stand in opposition to certain current scientific findings like that humans evolved from apes, and that the earth was not created in 7 days.  Some sociologists argue that religion is simply a system by which humanity explains reality, which is increasingly being replaced by a new system for explaining reality: science.

So we stand in a curious time where many Americans have abandoned religion altogether as not a reliable source of truth - a sort of quaint mythology of the past.   At the same time that many religions cling stubbornly to their holy books claiming them as a more accurate source of truth than science and fight to keep science out of the school or even out of court cases.  So we have a battle in the US right now about what is the more accurate source of truth: religion or science.   (Just as several centuries ago the battle of European society was over whether the Bible or the clergy was the more accurate source of knowing Truth.)   No where can this disputes difference be more clearly seen than in US response to climate change.  While at first a non-partisan issue, the Republican party has increasingly made it matter of doctrine within the Republican party that all "true" party members reject the truth of climate change by pretending that the 97% agreement among scientists means there is not scientific agreement about climate change being created by human activity.  The party has actually refused to support financially members who will not embrace this orthodoxy.  (Just as the church of  a previous era persecuted those who subscribed to the idea that the world was round.)

I read something recently that startled me.  It pointed out that for the percentage of the world population that is not literate (~14%), they mostly do not even know the word climate change, much less what it means.   It was a shocking idea thinking of people facing tsunamis and droughts with no understanding of why it is happening.  Will they again believe that the God(s) are mad?  But then the thought occurs to me that if one does not believe in science then again how does one explain all these catastrophes that are coming with increasing frequency.  Is God mad at us?  

And if you believe in both science and God as the vast majority of Americans do - so science explains to you what is happening in regards to climate change - that begs the question of how God feels about climate change.  If God is the creator/designer of all life on this planet through mechanisms exquisitely described by science - how would God not be ....well if not quite angry than certainly heartbroken over what this one species of creation has done to all the rest of creation?  I have heard human's very cynically say that if we destroy all life on earth than we will get what we deserve - that we will destroy ourselves, but that the planet will go on without us.   This I think is hubris of a different sort and a falsely comforting notion.  It denies what happens to a planet if you make its ocean dead, and somehow justifies the destruction of every other species.  In science systems have feedback loops, those carry both information and consequences.  It is time for us to start listening to the increasingly urgent messages of the planet: earthquakes, droughts, hurricanes, forest fires, and tsunamis and hear the Creator's voice begging us to protect creation.   It is time for people of faith to rise up with one voice in moral indignation at what we are doing to the planet.