Living through the Storm From today’s heavy rain, we see that, at least in the Portland area, the change of seasons has arrived. The fall crispness we enjoyed last week has turned to wet skies, soaked skins, and shriveling gardens. In our personal lives, we face change every day as we grow older, as setbacks occur, as loved ones die and children are born. Perhaps, like I do, you find that life buffets you at times like the winds of a storm. You may feel weighed down by news stories and Facebook feeds that catalogue the suffering of strangers from around the world. Perhaps the divisiveness of our country leaves…
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Healing from Historical Trauma
The Pain of Racism While working as a chaplain on a residential drug treatment unit, I had the opportunity to sit with a young man with white skin who had been given a roommate whose skin was dark. Having been raised to blame and reject dark-skinned people, he felt uncomfortable being close to this other man and wanted a different roommate. However, he didn’t feel he could just march up to nursing staff and make such a demand. He had at least that much understanding of social propriety. Instead, he came to me to try and process his feelings and behavior. As I invited him to focus on his emotions…
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Reducing Our Bias
Cognitive Bias We humans are stuck with this thing called cognitive bias. Because of the way our brains evolved, no matter how much we want to be rational and reasonable, we tend to jump to conclusions; make assumptions; judge others by the group to which they belong; change our memories; and give more weight to information that confirms, rather than challenges, our worldview. In other words, we’re full of isms and biases that our conscious mind may not even notice. This isn’t all bad, though. Cognitive biases make life easier. They speed up simple decision-making, make routine possible, and allow us respond to danger before we even realize there’s a…
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The Use and Abuse of Power
Trauma and Power Listening to Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, I am struck by how we, in the medical and mental health fields, too often use power to control those we deem sick or broken or crazy. As he worked in the field, van der Kolk came to realize that much of his professional training was geared to helping him and other doctors “stay in control in the face of terrifying and confusing realities.” [1] Being out of control frightens pretty much all of us. Clinicians get scared, too. Those of us with authority are used to being respected, deferred to, obeyed. When patients resist…
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The Patience of Recovery
The Patience of Creation Creation takes patience. Whether you’re forming a universe, writing a story, choreographing a dance, baking a souffle, or building a life, creation takes time. They say that God made everything we can see, smell, and touch – and much that we can’t – in six days, but He was a master, and we cannot compete. We can’t build a house in six days, nor can we grow a baby that fast, and it takes a lifetime to mature into our true selves, if we ever do. Becoming who we really are takes a lot of patience. To make it even harder, when we think have our…
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Hope in the Face of Suffering
Hope in the Future What is hope? Could it be trust in a new generation, the joy we feel when we watch young animals at play, babies being born? In our yard, a family of scrub jays has nested in the holly tree. As I write, the father submerges himself in the bird bath while the mother feeds their baby seeds and insects from the garden. Watching them, I smile, thinking of beauty and life that will continue after I am gone. Or could hope be the belief in an existence after death? At the hospital, I sit with a woman who is sick and weary from cancer. She begs…
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Joy in the Midst of Sorrow that Arises Out of Love
Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47:1 (NRSV) Joy and the Weight of the World Today, I don’t feel joyful. It seems the weight of the world is smothering me. Not only does the news distress me, but so does my reading material. This time, it’s Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a book about his career as a defense attorney for disenfranchised and economically-disadvantaged death row prisoners. He tells the stories of young men whose trials were a sham, with invented evidence and juries purposely selected to be unfriendly toward them. Throughout our country, a fearful and angry white population has…
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Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, and God’s Hands
Riding Roller Coasters Years ago, while preparing to preach about Pentecost, a holiday that at the time I knew nothing about, I discovered that one of my Unitarian Universalist colleagues had once been a Pentecostal minister. Pentecost and Pentecostal must be related, I figured, so I asked him to explain what this holiday was. He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he told me about an amusement park in the town where he grew up. The park was famous for its roller coasters. When he’d been a boy, they had this old wooden one. The train would chug along, inching up the slope, painfully cresting the hill, and then dash down the…
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Mother’s Day and the Joy of Turning
The Mess in Our World Today Thinking about Mother’s Day this year, I feel sad. A month ago, I wrote a song for the holiday, reflecting that it was, in some ways, a good thing my mother isn’t alive to see the mess we’ve made of our political and denominational world. In Unitarian Universalist circles, we still struggle to address race issues much as we did in the 1960s when the “black controversy” divided us. Now, voices are again raised in anger over our association’s “white supremacist culture,” while others defend themselves. In the United States, we are more divided than at any time except perhaps during the 1920s. Back then, the…
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Love, False Prophets, and Truth
Beware False Prophets In this week’s scripture reading, John 10:1-10, [1] Jesus warns us to beware the false prophet and heed only the true one. But how can we tell the false from the true? To answer this question, M. Russell Ballard, in a lecture given at the 1999 Latter Day Saints Conference, quotes Joseph Smith, founder of his faith, as saying, “We can accept nothing as authoritative but that which comes directly through the appointed channel, the constituted organizations of the Priesthood, which is the channel that God has appointed . . .” Anyone else, though he may claim to have received revelation from God, is an impostor. [2]…
