Living in a Parallel Universe What a week this has been. First, Raphael Warnock became the first black, and John Ossoff the first Jewish, men from Georgia to be elected to the United States Senate. Then, a mob, egged on by our president, broke into the Capitol building, thinking they had the power to stop the certification of the electoral college vote because Trump incorrectly implied that they did. Normally a routine ceremony, the certification was turned into a tedious farce by a few elected officials who chose to challenge the vote. They defended their actions by parroting the baseless claims of election fraud Trump has spouted for months, in…
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Healing Ourselves and Our Nation
Our Hurting Nation Our need for healing is evident. Like much of the rest of the world, we in the United States are in the midst of a pandemic that is overwhelming our capacity to provide care for the sick. Even if we will soon be able to control the virus physiologically, we will continue to reel from the emotional wounds the illness has wrought. Some of our elected officials have minimized the suffering this disease has caused, and minimizing intensifies pain. Because of the virus, tens of millions of people have lost jobs, and barely half of them have found new ones. [1] Social isolation has increased the incidence…
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The Stoics, Virtue, and Happiness
The Stress of These Times For anyone who has paid attention, this 2020 presidential election has been stressful. Now that we have a winner – and a loser – perhaps we can breathe. Yes, our current president is seeking salvation in the courts, but that’s not likely to happen. The threats of his followers may turn to violence, but the police and national guard are preparing themselves. The voting process was more peaceful than some of us feared. I suspect the transition in the White House will be as well. Around the country, there are calls for healing. It’s a wonderful idea, and I hope our next president and his…
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That No One Have Holes
No Holes The old woman in Catherynne M. Valente’s novel, Deathless, has no name, yet she still suffers. Her soldier son, Vitaliy, died when a bullet pierced him through. Even so, when Ivan Tsarevich wanders by, a stranger to the woman as she is a stranger to him, she invites him into her home. She shows him the food on the plates and tells him to eat. He should eat, he should get fat, he should live. “Be alive,” she tells him. She says this because she knows about holes. Her son died because of the hole inside him, and she, too, has a hole “like a bullet” in her…
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Lament and Creating Justice
A Year for Lamentation What a year this has been. In January, the Hong Kong protests were news. That same month, bushfires in Australia killed millions of animals. Later, the House impeached President Trump, and the Senate acquitted him. In Yemen, a civil war broke out. Then the pandemic hit, George Floyd was killed, and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted. Hurricanes and fires destroyed wilderness and devastated communities. Kobe Bryant died, as did John Prine, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others. We are reeling. Lament is a totally appropriate response. The term “lament” may bring up images of professional mourners wailing and carrying on as they stumble along…
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Truth and Our America
The Question of Truth Does such a thing as truth exist? If so, how do we define it? Is it relative, dependent on culture or worldview, making one truth as good as another? Can truth guide how we live and work and respond to the chaos overwhelming the United States today? The topic is huge. To explore it in depth would take a book. But there are some simple ideas we can look at. For instance, Michael Glanzberg, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, notes that philosophers have devised many ways of understanding how we know truth from falsehood. One way is to use the correspondence theory of truth.…
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Prayer Is Not Nothing
Nothing Left But Prayer This week at the recovery church meeting, we will talk about prayer. The timing seems right. As the United States reels from the effects of the pandemic, from forest fires and hurricanes, from a relentless cultural divide, and now, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from cancer, it seems as if all we have left to do is pray. It’s not just world events that leave us seeking comfort in ritual and supplication. When turbulence gets so bad it threatens the plane in which we ride, for instance, or medical interventions fail and we find ourselves perched at the edge of the afterlife, we can feel…
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Ownership, Complacency, and Giving Up Privilege
Change Is Coming The United States, along with many countries in the world, is in turmoil. Tension has been festering for decades, but because of the pandemic, a widening income gap, black and brown deaths at the hands of police, a broken healthcare system, and inequities caused by global warming, social unrest has erupted. Across the political spectrum, people feel threatened. Rebellion is a time-honored American tradition. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence declares “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of” the ability of its citizens to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the people have the right “to alter or to abolish it.” [1] Is this…
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The Courage to Hope
Accepting Our Lot in Life Between acceptance and hope lies a tension. According to Buddhist theory, the way out of suffering is through acceptance. By letting go of desire and aversion, by embracing the moment as it is, we become free, not of pain, but of the stories that make our pain miserable. Such acceptance, however, can lead to passivity. Years ago, in a source long forgotten, I read about a Buddhist woman who had grown ill, yet refused medication or medical support. It was her karma to become sick, she believed, and if she were to recover, it would be because it was her karma to get well. Medicine…
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Letting Go and Protests
Enough Is Enough This week, we are exploring what it means to let go. When I envisioned this column, I thought I would write about what happens when we cling to ideas, people, objects, and resentments the way we cling to addictions. I thought I would share some stories from my work as a chaplain that showed the tragedy of letting go, and the gifts. Then George Floyd was killed and protests erupted around the country. I thought about what it means to be white in America, how we are not directly affected by the abuse, murder, slavery, incarceration, and other traumas that have beset black Americans for hundreds of…