January 27, 2021
It’s been said that “Words make worlds,” and I’ve found that somehow even more powerful and meaningful as we seek to survive this pandemic. I penned this poem last May, when we were just a few months in and couldn’t conceive of losing more than 400,000 Americans to Covid-19.
Afterward
Remember how, for years, we feared
the Sacramento would run dry
and the lettuce in the Central Valley
would desiccate and blow away
for lack of snowpack in the Sierras?
Or that embers would waft
down from the sere hills and
our curated containers of memory
would explode and be
carried away on the wind
like flaming milkweed seeds
and, with singed eyebrows,
we would be forced
to run for our lives through
tunnels of flame?
Then the snows returned.
And the winds abated.
And the rains came.
And fear, like a casually discarded
candy wrapper, washed down
the storm drain and out to sea,
beyond the reach of memory.
And we went back to living
just as we had before, as if
it wasn’t real, and disaster,
in any form,
couldn’t strike again.
Other words I find compelling these days include CJ Suitt’s “In the Aftermath” and, of course, Amanda Gordon’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
December 24, 2019
Why Christmas?
Why do we, who don’t believe that Jesus is God incarnate, celebrate Christmas? Why do we show up at church for perhaps just this one time a year and listen with rapt attention to readings from a book not many of us consider holy, or at least only consider holy the way we consider many other writings holy? Why do we release ourselves from our skepticism and rational left brains that tell us about the impossibility of virgin births and the appearance of angels to shepherds in fields where they lay? Why do we, allow ourselves to joyfully sing with reckless abandon the carols that, shall we say, don’t exactly fit with our theology?
The reason we celebrate Christmas, even if we don’t believe that Jesus was the Christ, is because the birth of the baby Jesus reminds us to hope. Christmas reminds us, at the end of every year, when maybe our reserves of hope have dwindled to a small guttering candle, that hope is born and reborn not just every year, but every day, every minute, every second. With the birth of every child, but not just with a child. Every moment of our lives we have the power to choose hope. To birth hope within ourselves. Even when everything around us points to hopelessness.
This year, the story of the magi, the Wise Ones, reminds me particularly about the choice we have to give birth, or rebirth, to hope, to keep hope alive. The Wise Men stopped on their journey to pay homage to King Herod, as was the custom when one was traveling through a king’s realm. They met with Herod, and Herod, whose power was threatened by the birth of this child, said to them, “Hey, can you do us a favor?” He wanted the wise men to come back and tell him exactly where Jesus was so that he could get rid of his political rival. And the Wise Men nodded and told Herod what he wanted to hear, knowing that the evil despot had the power to hold them hostage or withhold his protection as they traveled through his realm. Then they went on their way, following the star. And when they found Jesus, they bowed down before the baby. And then they made a choice. They made a choice. They made a choice not to give in to Herod’s scheming. I imagine that they blew the whistle on Herod’s whole plot by telling Mary and Joseph that their child was in danger. And rather than passing back by Herod’s palace, they went home another way. In that moment before the manger, the Wise Men chose to protect the baby Jesus. They chose to keep hope alive.
This is the message of the Christmas story, and why we who don’t believe in its literal truth celebrate it, year after year. The message is that hope wins. That we can vanquish evil despots by choosing hope. That we can overcome fear by choosing hope. That no matter how dark the night appears, we can light a flickering candle by choosing hope.
So, once again let’s tell the ancient story and, after, go out into the cold, into the dark. Into a world that daily, it seems, becomes more brutish and nasty and mean. Let us take this message of Christmas with us, the message that there is another, better way. Let us, in our living, choose hope. Let us be the Wise Ones, who make the choice to keep hope alive.
November 18, 2019
What Matters Most
I recently conducted a memorial service for a young woman who had died by suicide. She left behind a loving husband and her five year old daughter, as well as her mother and siblings. It was, in every sense of the word, a tragedy.
I had only met this woman briefly on a few occasions, but she made a big impression in a short time. She talked about having just received an advanced degree and starting a new job. She said she was looking forward to becoming a part of our congregation and enrolling her daughter in our religious education program. She was one of those people you wanted to be around. She seemed so full of life and hope and dreams. That’s why I had such a disconnect when I received a call from her sister, telling me what had happened. “How could someone like that do something like this?” I asked myself. It made no sense. And then in conversations with her family, I discovered that she had been waging a life-long battle with depression and bipolar disorder, and I realized that all was not as it seemed on the surface.
As I have reflected on this woman’s life, and her death, these past few weeks, I’ve reached a simple, but perhaps profound, conclusion: All of our lives are incredibly complex. Each of us has much more going on than we like to admit, to each other and perhaps to ourselves. Every one of us has a story that we hold deep in our hearts, that is ever unfolding, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and we are much more than we appear to be. We all wrestle with our demons, and yet we present brave faces to the world. And even when we think we know someone well, there’s a lot we don’t know.
Knowing that every one of us struggles, every one of us hurts, every one of us is so much more than meets the eye, we must, in our every encounter, treat each other with kindness. Kindness is the healing balm of the soul. Kindness must be our “default” mode of interaction, because we don’t know what the other person is really going through.
In her poem “Kindness,” the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
With this young woman’s death, I realize that it is “only kindness that makes sense any more.” It is kindness that we have been looking for. Kindness is the only gift we can give each other that will ever really matter.