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Day 29 Reflection: Sacred

I looked up sacred and found this definition: dedicated to a religious purpose. Religion is defined as

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs (BBC, 2014).

In other words, the sacred is set apart from secular (or profane) life through belief in a deity or deities and the worship of those deities. How it is experienced differs from person to person, but there is this sense of specialness, this celebration of mystery, that is held separate from ordinary life.

In these days of “spiritual but not religious”, the definition seems to discount the experience of countless people finding deep, transcendent meaning to their lives and experiences without benefit of organized religion and church services. Some people find experiences in nature as sacred, set apart from the mundane moments of their life. Some find their volunteer work as sacred. Panentheists find the sacred permeating all of their life and do not see a separation of sacred and secular.

Apparently, we need to have the sacred in our lives, a glimpse into the infathomable, the Great Mystery. 


BBC (2014). Religions. Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/ [April 3, 2019].

 

Day 28 Reflection: Wisdom

We are told that our elders hold wisdom (and having just reached AARP age, I certainly hope so). But at the same time, as people get older, many become more resistant to change. 

We are told that wisdom comes from experience, but some people learn nothing from their experiences.

How do we discern wisdom, then?

Wisdom doesn’t bubble up out of fear or anger, although fear or anger may make us reach for wisdom. It rises from the still pool at the center of our being.  It may goad us to act or ask us to wait, but it does so with a sense of what has gone before and a great deliberation. The answer it gives is grounded in humankind’s best nature, deep in understanding.

Do not mistake wisdom with the resignation of “things have always been this way”, or the self-righteousness of “things have always been this way”. Wisdom is not about preserving or giving to the past. Wisdom is about learning from the past and using it for advancing a life, a people, a world into its future.

Day 1 Camp Nano April 2019: The beginning of Gods’ Seeds:

 I’m trying to motivate for April Camp Nanowrimo and a new book. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:
 *****

A group of beings — human-like, but with a venerable air for all their apparent youth —  sat in a room whose black crystal-crusted walls shone with reflected light from the molten white floor, from the white and silver table, and seemingly from the participants themselves. The paucity of light did not lessen the sterility of the surroundings. 

“The Apocalypse proved that we, the Archetypes, no longer take our protection of the human patterns seriously,” Luke Dunstan said earnestly, his hands tented in thought. His visage, weathered in contrast to the unlined faces of the other immortals around him, announced that he had become worldly and, unlike most Archetypes, had committed evil — in his case, for the sake of good. Unlike most Archetypes, he had also repented, which gave him a perspective that could be called almost human. 

“But they still embrace evil,” the Baraka Archetype, short and spare like his people, countered. “They fight wars. They envy each other and they commit crimes out of greed.”

“Or out of want, or madness, or jealousy or a dozen other things,” Luke stated, the grimace on his face reflecting a view of reality he knew had wavered from the neutrality of an Archetype. Su, his consort and the Oldest of the Oldest, watched impassively, her tightly curled hair ruddy in the sparse light. She knew how to play the game, Luke noted sourly, something he had lost in his long association with humankind.

“If we give them the full impact of their cultural histories — not just the facts, but the emotions — the fear, the hatred, the xenophobia — “ The Bering Strait Archetype trailed off.

“How do you know it will make them worse? They already have the stories of their peoples’ pasts, and those seem to inspire xenophobia, it’s true. But what if they remember the full impact of the losses of war and weigh it against their hatred — would they decide to fight more? Or would they lay their weapons down?”  Luke paused to take a breath, to calm himself down, to wear the gravitas of the Archetype instead of the passion of humans. “The point is that, if they kill each other, millions of them will not die with each death. If we keep holding the patterns of the humans — “ 

“One of our deaths will kill millions of humans,” Su interjected. “Which is why the Maker created us nearly immortal. Yet Lilith, who held the patterns of all women, was nearly killed by our kind. Can we guarantee this won’t happen again?”

All of a sudden the residents of the room stopped speaking. Luke felt as if a wind had cut through his immortal bones and chilled them for just a moment. Then he felt the weight, a weight of the history of countless descendents of the people of the seax, the knife that gave its name to the Saxons. And then his burdens vanished, and he felt a hollowness inside. The gasps from the others at the table echoed his.

“What — what was that?” The Ibero-Maurasian snapped, breaking the silence..

“I think — Su, did you notice anything?” Luke asked, knowing that Su had not carried humans’ patterns, their cultural DNA, for millennia as all her people, the Denisovans, had long since become extinct.

“Nothing,” Su answered, “except that all of you around me froze for a moment, and slumped forward. As if something had been taken away from you.”

“As it has,” the Bering Strait Archetype murmured. “I think — I think we have lost our patterns, and if we have, the Maker has taken them from us.” He sounded bewildered, as if something more than the weight of patterns had been taken from him.

“I must see — “ the Ibero-Maurasian said, then paused, and Luke knew that she mindspoke another Archetype. “No,” she finally said, speaking slowly as if weighing each word. “I think we are the only ones whose patterns have been taken.”

“But what does this mean?”  the Baraka demanded.

The Arnhem Archetype, theretofore silent, spoke. “I think this means that the Maker has decided for us — He will take our patterns from us whether we are ready to relinquish them or not. And we’re the harbingers of this big change.”

Day 27 Reflection: Gratitude

Everyone knows that gratitude makes people happier. 

Maybe not everyone, but popular psychology instructs us to write gratitude journals, naming a magic three things per day that we feel grateful for. One can find gratitude journals in hard-bound form, in smartphone apps, and in Facebook memes. That’s because gratitude journaling works, according to research in positive psychology (Emmons and McCullough, 2003). 

Some days it’s hard to write anything in the gratitude journal. Days when little things go wrong one after another, we hug those hurts to ourselves as if to use them as currency to bargain with our Maker for better luck. When we fall into negative self-talk, learned patterns of pessimism, we can’t find a thing to be grateful for. Gratitude doesn’t come to mind when we suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

I have those days of suffering, given that I live with Bipolar 2, which I’ve been open about in these pages. I also wrestle with negative self-talk. I’ve wrangled these two into submission for the most part, but still depression and darkness pop out at times.

I challenge the darkness with gratitude:

I am grateful for my bipolar disorder, because it has made me take care of myself. I am grateful because it has given me insight into suffering.

I am grateful for getting my manuscripts rejected because it has forced me to work harder and improve my writing.

I am grateful for my struggles because they remind me that nothing is simple in life.

 

Day 26 Reflection: Mercy

I have hurt other people with my actions. Other people have hurt me with their actions. Sometimes our actions are deliberately chosen to cause harm; more often, we act out of ignorance or out of our brokenness. 

When we are the one who hurt someone, we want mercy. We want them to look at us and say, “I will not punish you. I will not fire you, or cut you off from this friendship, or levee this fine on you. I will not carry on this family feud.” Because that is what mercy is: the act of withholding punishment.

When we are the hurt ones, we struggle to deliver mercy. Because we’re hurt, damn it. Because we have been betrayed. The desire to inflict hurt, we believe, lessens our pain. We want retribution, in other words.

Punishing someone doesn’t lessen our pain. Intuitively, it seems like it should. But punishment is not the same thing as seeking restitution or remediation. Restitution is restoring what was lost, whether money or trust. Remediation is fixing the problem. These things, not retribution, set the balance right.

An example of giving mercy through process is restorative justice, which seeks to connect offender and victim and allow the victim and community to truly speak their sorrow, their pain and anger. 
Restorative justice is a hard concept to fathom, because it requires reconciliation rather than adjudication. It requires facing the offender and explaining the hurt, and it requires the offender listen. We don’t quite trust the process. It doesn’t always work. But the willingness to try it is what we call mercy.

Day 25 Reflection: Blessings

 Note: I am not usually overly Christian in my writing, being rather universalist in my leanings. But as the topic is blessings, I thought I would write in the dominant American religious view, Christianity, and its struggle with the concept of blessings.
******

I dreamed last night that I was watching a religious TV movie and then I was in it. In the dream, I had checked in to this hotel of sorts, feeling rather down, and I noticed the others in there with me suffered from similar struggles. Being in this place, this boarding house of sorts, elevated us and helped us feel more cherished in the world.

Then I stepped out of the movie for a moment and said to my husband, who watched the movie with me (at a bed-and-breakfast, incidentally) “Watch what happens” in the most cynical tone of voice.

When I returned to the movie, one of the people running the establishment had added a month’s supply of some sort of supplement to my bill. And then the other residents started objecting to the new residents who had come in — from what a sputtering man said, his children should not be exposed to what he called “girly-boys”. 

In a state of being blessed, we too often ask God to bless people like ourselves, not who we see as our enemies. We’d prefer it if God smote our enemies, like He did in the Old Testament. After all, they’re evil. They’re our enemies. We are the chosen ones, after all. We are Christian.

Actually, that’s not Christian. We are supposed to have evolved from that when Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount and when He gave his one Commandmant: Love your God above all and your brother as yourself — and note that he specifically gave an example of the Other — the despised Samaritans — as our brother. 

If you are blessed, bless others. Bless those not like you. Bless your enemies. Blessings are not an economic good — that is, there is no finite amount of blessings such that blessings to your enemies or strangers detract from yours. It may be that your blessings to others soften their hearts or soften yours.

 At the very least, blessing your enemies takes away the constant tension of hating your enemies and wishing them bad. You will find that a blessing.

Day 24 Reflection: Understanding

We nod our heads and say “I understand.”

Do we really understand those around us — friends in crisis, strangers in need, people surrounded by injustice?

Too many times, we use the words “I understand” to mean something quite opposite — something along the lines of “Please stop talking, I can’t really handle this.” It’s easy to tell when we are saying “I understand” to stop the flow of a difficult story, because the words come out of a sense of rising panic.

We can’t understand until we open up and sit with someone’s words and feelings. We need to listen without prejudging to get the message. We need to make meaning of their words to understand. If we can’t do this, we need to find someone else to listen. 

We might be tempted to offer solutions — we can’t truly understand if we’re doing this, because we’re searching for the problems to solve. We’re not using the silence between words to understand, but to select what we think is the big problem to solve.

To truly understand is to accept what the other says — not accepting it as universal truth, but accept it as that person’s truth. This can be sobering, frightening, or terrifying at times. But understanding is the first step to bridging the gap between people, to healing hurts, to changing the world.

Day 23 Reflection: Dust

I associate dust with death. It must be my Roman Catholic upbringing and the rites of Ash Wednesday: Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.  I prefer my father’s tongue-in-cheek version: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the Good Lord don’t get you, the Devil must. 

The Biblical metaphor does capture a truth: Life does come from dust. Dust contains numerous forms of tiny life: mites, bacteria, mold spores, plus specks of amino acids. The primordial ooze that begat the first life on earth was dust mixed with water for life.

When I die, I want to be cremated and scattered in a peaceful garden. I want to become nutrients for the grass and flowers. I want to scatter in the wind, become one with the soil. 

I cannot think of a better thing to be than dust.

Day 22 Reflection: Safety

In my undergraduate economics class, my professor explained the relationship between speed and safety for consumers. Consumers, he said, didn’t want a completely safe driving, but a moderately safe driving experience. Which was why, as car manufacturers introduced safety innovations like seatbelts and antilock braking systems, people drove faster. My professor drew a graph to illustrate this, a supply/demand graph with the axes labeled safety and speed, and there was the answer in mathematic black-and-white.

People don’t want to be too safe. They relish the feeling of speed, and will drive faster if their cars are safer. Think about that.

Conversely, when safety decreases, we take fewer risks. Perhaps this is easier to imagine. People who grow up with abuse live in a miasma of implicit danger and don’t take the risk of reaching out for relationships. Authoritarian states silence the huge majority of dissenters because the stakes are too high to dissent. 

We need to take risks to love, to create, to move forward. To become more human. Ironically, to do so, we need more safety. Those of us who feel safe must take the risk to address the unsafe conditions for others — the LGBT community, people of color, people of different religions. We need to stand up for others’ safety not just so they feel safe, but so they can move forward.mj