Looking Back: Five Personal Lessons from 2010
by: Amanda Udis-Kessler on December 30th, 2010 | 14 Comments »
UU Flaming Chalice (author unknown)
It’s common around the turning of the year to look forward, to make resolutions of change, to wonder what new experiences might await us. Today, I would like to do something different: in honor of the year just passed, I would like to list the five most important lessons I learned this year as a spiritual progressive. I’m culling these lessons from three particular sources: my seminary experiences to date (since starting in August), my experiences writing for Tikkun (which began late spring), and my long, slow, and incomplete recovery from a detached retina in late August, which has cost me a fair amount of vision in my right eye. I realize these experiences are individual and personal, but my sense is that the insights that have come from them are not particularly unique. Indeed, I would normally say that these lessons are simply clichés, but for me they have been hard won and so are precious. In no particular order:
1. Patience is a gift and a spiritual discipline. I was hardly able to read, write, or use a computer for the first month of recovery after my retinal reattachment surgery. As someone who does not meditate or rest in silence well, I found this period excruciating. My difficulty with patience, and my attempts to cultivate it, clarified for me that I may not have the gift of patience but that I surely need to be practicing the spiritual discipline of patience – both as a spiritually minded person and as a progressive (since, God knows, progressives need patience).
2. Assumptions don’t help; good communication does. As the only Unitarian Universalist in my otherwise Christian seminary class (and as the only non-heterosexual in the group), I was nervous about my ability to befriend my classmates. Once I met them, I was delighted to find that none of them were perturbed by a non-Christian classmate or, indeed, a non-heterosexual one. Almost immediately, all of us worked hard to practice good clear communication to make sure no one was offending anyone else, and the result over time has been a truly grace-filled community – not a perfect community, for sure, but a good site of practice and joy.
3. Someone else’s perspective does not have to jump-start my ego defenses. Writing relatively controversial material for Tikkun has, unsurprisingly, led to encounters with people with very different perspectives from my own, people who sometimes respond in anger, fear, or judgment. It can be profoundly challenging not to respond back out of my own insecurity but if I have learned anything from blogging it has been exactly that: to ignore write-ins that I have no way to respond to, and to respond with patience and care to those replies that I find most difficult. It’s been a useful, if nerve-wracking, spiritual discipline, for which I am grateful.
4. It is important to acknowledge the challenges of trying to be both a spiritual person and a progressive. Maybe everyone else has this down and I am just a slow learner, but I find there to be some tensions between the wisdom of the spiritual path and the analysis of the sociological, social justice path. Seeing people in terms of their social groups and their various levels of privilege, power, and penalty is different from encountering every individual as a manifestation of the holy, regardless of where they stand socially. There seems to be something paradoxical about progressive spirituality. I would welcome hearing from people who have figured this one out.
5. At the end of the day both spirituality and progressive politics are about people, not words; about love, not theory. I’m still working on this one. Let’s call it my resolution for 2011: to live this lesson out more faithfully.
What have you learned this year that has deepened you as a spiritual progressive? Please write in! And, of course, Happy New Year to those of you who celebrate January 1 as the beginning of the year. May it be a blessed one for all of us.
Dear Amanda:
I am a New Yorker and almost by definition, that marks me as a Liberal….or is commonly expressed these days, a Progressive. I like to define myself also as a Christian and I am a devoted member of a Protestant Church here (I often reflect on the word “Protestant” and its root “Protest!”) And yes, there is much (as a Progressive) that I protest. The way we treat one another, for example. My religion teaches me two things: Love God, and love one another. Jesus Christ said that. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” I figure if I can get that much down, all the rest will fall into place.
Sheila
Thanks for writing in, Sheila. I am actually a New Yorker by birth, though now residing in Colorado because my partner has a tenured college professor position here. I appreciate what you chose to focus on. If we all practiced treating the holy, each other, and ourselves with the love, care, and compassion that all three deserve, this world would be a LOT better. Happy New Year, Amanda
I feel like commenting but I’m not sure why. I am not religious, nor do I think of myself as “spiritual” (a term in search of a definition if there ever was one). Yet I belonged to a UU church for more than a decade, and I come to this website often to read.
What ever I’m searching for, two things struck me about this article. First, the thought that “progressive politics are about people, not words; about love, not theory.” But I’m uncomfortable with “love” in that sentence. “Compassion” seems a better fit for me.
And second, that it is so easy to respond to opinions with which I disagree “in anger, fear, or judgment.” That, alone, is a valuable thing to focus upon NOT doing as I enter the new year.
Well, PensiveGadfly, your insights are as good as anyone’s, so I am glad you wrote in. I will think about whether “compassion” might be a better fit than “love” in that final point; it is very possible. And of course each of us is potentially as prone to that “anger, fear, or judgment” as are the people responding to us, and while we can’t work on changing their responses, we can work on changing our own. Happy New Year, Amanda
What a nourishing piece of thought and feeling. I especially appreciate your sharing your pain and challenges with your health difficulties. It adds a sense of even more personal connection to the other thoughts you offer.
shira
Thanks, Shira. Very kind words. I wish you a lovely 2011. Peace, Amanda
Excellent, Amanda! Thank you from a fellow Unitarian and Progressive and Spiritual person! And Blessings for the New Year.
Right back at ya, Bob! Peace and joy, Amanda
Hi Amanda –I hear what you say as worthy learnings for any one of us, religious or not.
After 70 plus a few years of learning on this planet, I would like to suggest that much of the world’s woe is related to our human seeming “need” to classify anything and everything, and then deposit that definition into a tiny cubbyhole.
For some purposes this works well — but for human beings I find all forms of classification is disharmonious with who we all are at core, which is a highly intelligent form of energy made of light, the same light which throbs from the heart of the universe.
In fact I believe that there is no such thing as a progressive, a fundamentalist, a Buddhist, a Jew, A Christian, an agnostic, an atheist, Republican-Democrat-Independent-Communist-Anarchist etc etc — no entity called Canadian, Japanese, Russian, Korean, etc.
You get my drift?
None of these words have any existence –they are simply sounds that we attach to living entities, the nature of which we have no real capacity to define –although through the medium of the heart, we may feel.
And to finish this off — the ancient Jews attached the word ‘Jaweh’ to the fiery energy they sensed and felt and heard and saw as what the later world commonly referred to as God.
Except –they didn’t utter that word –it was regarded as something too potent to put into human words of any kind — so in prayers etc. they left the name unpronounced.
The meaning of JHWH . is still unknown to a large degree, but the common- meaning derived by scholars is something like “I am who I am” , or “I will be who I will be.”
I am not Jewish — but I like this reasoning —
Being the anxious creatures I know us to be, I expect few will take seriously the call to abandon defining God or humans as any number of things — but I do think if we resist the need to”‘name”
that which is esentially un-nameable, then we just may start to capture the odd glimpse of our fellow humans –and ourselves –as that nameless form of energy that burns with the heat of the forge that fashioned and re-fashions the glorious , expanding,living phenomenon that we call the Universe.
Al
Thank you, Al. I very much appreciate your writing in. This is an issue with which I struggle, and (sorry for the categories) I think it actually is an example of one of those tensions between “spirituality” and “political progressivism” in the sense that one spiritual goal or process or practice is indeed being in and part of the oneness of Ultimacy in which all distinctions are burned away (Seals and Crofts sang about “the dazzling light uniting black and white;” U2 sang about “the Kingdom Come where all the colors will bleed into one”) – and yet, if we are really about healing the world, we must be able to name specific forms of inequality, which means identifying discreet groups and understanding the power they do and don’t have, the ways they are devalued or over-valued, dehumanized or held up. (I am a sociologist by training; sorry.) To draw on my own life experience, my being female may have no bearing on my relationship with the holy, but it surely has a LOT of bearing on some sexually awful things that happened to me in my youth. It does not honor my life, experiences, or quest for the holy to deny those realities because “it’s all one in G-d.” Similarly, I happen not to be heterosexual. Does this matter to the divine fire? Not even slightly. Has it shaped my life significantly? Of course. So I have come to feel that many of us need to live with a paradox on this issue, which has been best described by now-deceased lesbian feminist African-American poet Pat Parker in her poem “For the White Person Who Wants to Be My Friend.” The first two lines of the poem go something like this: “The first thing you must do is forget I’m black. The second thing you must do is to never forget that I’m black.” Can we live with this parodox? I think so…and for some of us, it is not an option to reject it. Peace, Amanda
Amanda — the paradox you speak of is a worthwhile image I think — and yes — it is a hard line to walk, to honour both contexts.
There is a kind of hypnotic effect invoked, whenever something or someone is labelled — immediatley we think we understand that person or thing a bit better or completely — because we have filed them into a category.
And in doing so we don’t even begin to explore the wonderful mystery that is involved.
At the worst this leads to sterotyping, which leads to a dead end — unlike keeping all circuits open to further exploration, which results in further discovery and genuine dialogue.
Religion has been almost totally corrupted as a result of this mind -heart-trap.
Whereas it should be delivering a wholly different quality of mind and heart — if it were to be understood and explored for what it truly is — religio— that which binds together and unites– rather than separating by endless naming, and then filing away as said and done.
Perhaps we humans should give up talking for one whole year! (Withing hours if not minutes, we would find ourselves going completely berserk, when we found ourselves unable to indulge in the powerful device of labelling — )
Al
Well, Al, I have the deepest respect for those who worship in silence and who seek out silence in their lives. I do agree that this is a good thing, but my sense of the tension I described above still holds. Peace, Amanda
Hi again Amanda — I am not at all talking about”those who worship in silence”— I am talking
about being fully conscious and aware of the power of language, and how we use it, and what and who we define by it.
And also about meeting one another in that conscious awareness, rather than looking for labels to hang on other people and even situations , in which we then confine them, rather than breaking through soul to soul, inner being to inner being, seeking points of convergence rather than those of difference.
Eckhart Tolle describes this in terms of “beholding” –not just looking with examination and judgement, but looking with discernment and understanding –and appreciation for who and what the object of beholding is within themselves.
One of his forerunners in this point of view was a magnificent Jewish scholar whose thought was vastly influential in the last century.
His most influential book was “I and Thou”, and his central affirmation was that we create violence when we perceive others as “Its”, rather than “Thous”.
In a thou to thou relationship we engage as fully human beings — if I bring to my human relationships the quality of seeing others as it, then I rob them of their true fullness of being, and I reduce myself and them to a fraction of their true being.
If this formula were widely respected –where would the tension be?
Al
And thanks for replying…peace, Amanda