photo by Jakub Fulin

A gale force wind always seems to precede dub poet d’bi.young when she enters a room. Her fierce presence and her unstoppable energy are perhaps the most noticeable things about her, but what lingers after the first impression is her overwhelming determination in her mission to spread the word about love, equality and social action.

The first time I met d’bi.young, I had taken a group of students in a college course entitled “Dangerous Acts: Dramatic Literature as a Tool of Social Change” to a production that she had written, performed, and produced with fellow artist Naila Keleta Mae. Both women are Jamaican-Canadians, and their work handled a range of issues including abuse, poverty, racism and social inequity. I had arranged for the artists to have a talk back session after the show with my students, a number of whom were Caribbean – Canadians themselves – and this turned out to be one of the most moving moments I can think of during my teaching career. My students, some of whom were prone to feeling indifferent and powerless in the face of some of the challenges they faced, became animated, engaged and passionate. The performance had managed to reflect back to my students something about their own lives, and this alone was enough for them to elevate their view of who they were and what they could accomplish in their lives. This was, in no small part, thanks to the warmth, the honesty and the strength of the drama, but also of the artists. A pair of students who saw the show that night went on to do their oral presentation on d’bi.young and her work, and they reported feeling that her work touched them in a special way, and made them realize their own power. When an artist manages to bring this passion to the classroom, the effect is tremendous. Since this experience, I have taught d’bi.young’s work in a number of different contexts, and I can say that my students always find that her voice speaks to them in a way that compels not just their intellect, but their hearts.

d’bi.young’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love. In the video below, d’bi.young elaborates upon her vision of a love that is honest, compassionate, and forgiving.

Nina (not her real name) was beside herself with anguish. For months she was convinced that Simon’s (another fictitious name) relationship with his ex-girlfriend still had unfinished business. He acknowledged it, and they talked about it again and again, without any relief in sight. He was responding defensively instead of being able to hear her pain, and they spiraled, repeatedly, to the verge of a breakup neither of them wanted.

When Nina asked for my support in how to navigate this situation, I invited her to take full responsibility for her reactions as an opportunity to grow and stretch in an area of pain. This doesn’t mean she won’t have pain. It only means that when the pain arises she can choose to own it and be with it rather than attempt to manage it by asking Simon to be or do something different.

This is a deep practice, and one that I imagine can be very liberating for Nina. It’s about pulling back, again and again, from blaming and judging and trying to make things different from what they are. It’s about cultivating acceptance of life, Simon, and herself, and stretching and stretching to embrace at one and the same time the reality of love and care between the two of them alongside the radical uncertainty of the future.

Parable of the Leaven (etching by Jan Luyken, photo by Phillip Medhurst)

This sermon was preached at the High Plains Church, Unitarian Universalist, on Colorado Springs Pride Day, 2011. The sermon has been modified somewhat to fit the current context.

Luke 13:20-21: And again he said, “To what should I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

In 2009, I went to theannual conference for my Unitarian Universalist district, where singer and activist Holly Near gave the keynote speech, which was really more of a keynote sing with brief stories between the songs. We all sang along and had a marvelous time. When Holly got to “Singing for Our Lives,” which we often sing during pride services, she introduced it with an explanation for a recent change of words in one of the verses.

by Paul Von Blum

Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era. Her three-dimensional pieces explore her personal and family history that reflects her nomadic history from her birth in Germany in a military family through her odyssey of living at more than forty addresses in various locations throughout her fifty-four years.

Telling Stories of the Family Tree. Click on the photo above to see more art by Dominique Moody.

Her works are simultaneously individual and social and make her the heir of some of the most influential African American artists of recent times.

Moody herself is the first to acknowledge the profound influences of her distinguished visual predecessors. Los Angeles is the site of the Watts Towers, perhaps the most famous example of folk art in the world. Simon Rodia’s majestic towers were constructed from steel pipes and rods, wrapped with wire mesh, and decorated with such found objects as bottles, scrap metal, sea shells, broken glass, pottery fragments, and bits of ceramic tile. Known to millions of Southern Californians and countless visitors, the Watts Towers are the quintessential example of turning trash into treasure. But fewer people, including scholars and professional art historians, are fully aware of how Rodia’s monumental achievement helped catalyze an artistic renaissance that has stunning implications for African American and other neglected creative communities well into the twenty-first century.

I am the mother you ought to fear.

I am the mother you ought to regard with awe and wonder.

I am not any of the Mother Gods you think you know. I am not the triune female divine – virgin, mother, crone. I am not the Madonna tenderly caring for her infant child. I am not Mary of the Pieta holding the crucified body of her sacrificed son. I am not Ala, Mami, Gaia or Kali. I am not Woman Wisdom of the biblical book of Proverbs. I am the nameless mother who is the mother of all the elements that come together to make life possible. I am also the mother of all that comes together to destroy every material thing you value.

I am the mother of volcano, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, cyclone, tornado, blizzard, fire and flood. I breathe heat and bring drought. And my message to you this Mother’s Day is stop with the nonsense.

Martin Nowak

OK, so the actual article in the New Scientist is headlined “The mathematics of being nice” but I’m suspicious enough of what is, nonetheless, my favorite science mag to see that word “nice” as a slightly snide diminution of what the article actually says (as in a pandering to anti-religious sentiment, but, hey, they ran the article!). Here’s a quote from the interview with Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University:

So how do you see religion?
I see the teachings of world religions as an analysis of human life and an attempt to help. They intend to promote unselfish behaviour, love and forgiveness. When you look at mathematical models for the evolution of cooperation you also find that winning strategies must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. In a sense, the world’s religions hit on these ideas first, thousands of years ago.

Now, for the first time, we can see these ideas in terms of mathematics. Who would have thought that you could prove mathematically that, in a world where everybody is out for himself, the winning strategy is to be forgiving, and that those who cannot forgive can never win?

This week’s spiritual wisdom on unconditional love comes from Joyce Rupp’s “Fragments of your Ancient Name: 365 Glimpses of the Divine for Daily Meditation.” Rupp is an author, retreat leader, and spiritual midwife. For more information on Rupp, visit her website.

Unconditional Love

You are Love like no other.
Love so large you contain our smallness.
Love so deep you accept our shallowness.
Love so strong you carry our weakness.
Love so wide you enclose our wandering.
Love so tender you experience our hurting.
Love so tolerable you outlive our apathy.
Love so ardent you thaw our coldness.
Love so true you endure our betrayals.
Love so patient you wait for our returning.

Today: I accept that I am loved unconditionally.

Whenever I hear political pundits talk about anger and fear as primary motivating factors for the outcome of elections, I ask: where is the love? I cannot speak for my sister and brother citizens, but my frustration with politics and my righteous indignation grows from passion, from a radical love for my country. I suspect this is probably true for others as well, even those with whom I do not agree politically.

A country is more than geography, history, culture, and shared values and beliefs. A country is made of human relationships. It is made of relationships between humanity, animals and ecosystems. It is made of relationships with all the other peoples and nations of the world. My country is the place of my birth, the land upon which I stand. My country is also all the people who chose to come to it, documented or not, to work and learn and contribute to our survival and flourishing.

My country is all my various families, all my various communities, my ancestors, peers and progeny. My country is all the people I love and who love me in return. My country is all of my rivals, my opposites in the democratic contestation of ideas that at once constitutes and is constituted by our moral values. I love all the various relationships that my country is with a passion.

We do not speak much about love in our public discourse. We speak even less about passionate love. The terminology makes us nervous. Beyond its sexual connotations, love is both weakness and strength. We are powerless before it, but it makes us strong enough to do incredible things. We think of passionate love as dangerous out of control violent ardor. It is too intense for polite conversation.

Anna Stevenson, her beloved husband Lewis, and their beloved pooch, Poppy.

Yesterday was a bit of a hard day. I had to do end-of-the-year tax payments and the gozintas and gozoutas for the year weren’t looking very good. Some other stuff was going on that really had me down. Sigh.

I had to open up my old email software to find the message from our accountant so I could print out the quarterly payment forms. When I clicked on my “personal” folder it opened to a message from my friend Anna which she wrote to me back in 2004. Anna died around a year ago and I was pretty surprised that on the day before New Years Eve I’d land on a message from her.

Intrigued about what she had to say? Read on.

On the darkest day of the year in the northern half of the globe, the deepest gloom has already passed, and the next day will be brighter.

Darkness serves a purpose. It is necessary for rest and for regeneration. Unpolluted black velvet starless moonless night does not differentiate. Deprived of sight, we see through sound, taste, touch and the mind’s eye imagining fresh possibilities both alluring and frightening.

Even before the winter solstice the cold comes with its secret that the only way to stay warm is to relax into its frigid embrace. Some of us migrate. Some hibernate. Most of us continue our work as best we can as the weather allows. When the snow falls softly, quietly and blankets the landscape there is a deep peace. A friendly fire or a warm comforter keeps us company. It is the season for hot chocolate, stews, soups, chowders and chili warming us from the inside out.

The sparkling bare beauty of winter is fleeting. In a few short weeks, we will be planning the spring garden. The earth will be soft again, the flowers laughing in pastel colors again. Then summer heat and autumn cool and winter will be back again.

Last week, I had the privilege of reading from my novel, Hold Love Strong, at Pete’s Candystore, a great venue in Brooklyn, a few blocks from 334 Manhattan Avenue, where once I lived in the middle of a friend’s apartment and often climbed the fire escape to the roof where I began to piece my life back together; or rather, began the process of reflection and self-possession necessary for living a full and meaningful life. After I read, Nadia and I had the chance to speak with Mira Jacobs, one of the curators of the event and a mother to a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Zakir, a name that means remembering and/or grateful. Talking about new motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth, Nadia repeated a phrase a friend had recently said to her, and although she meant it in reference to having a baby, it is, I think, at the very core to the solutions of our present social and political problems, and thus what we — those of us who wish for a peaceful, humane world if not for ourselves then for our children — must do and anchor ourselves to in order for there to be the chance for the world we can imagine, the world we deserve.

“Be ready,” she said, “for overwhelming joy.”

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement on the nature of God, which was broadcast to America from London in October 1931:

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:

Truly healing and mending the world can seem like an overwhelming task, beyond the capacity of everyday folks. It’s easy to feel that only big actions — starting an organization, a publication, a nonprofit, or a school and reaching at least thousands — counts. In today’s post, I’d like to say a word in favor of one-to-one generosity because recently I experienced several instances that were balms and blessings.

Case One, the Restaurateur

Over winter break, my family and thousands of others attempted to visit the Academy of Science. It should have been a tip-off that vehicles lined even the furthest edges of Golden Gate Park, so, after learning that we’d have to wait three hours or make alternate plans, we began trudging back to our distant, expensive parking lot. Along the way, my husband noticed a vegetarian Indian restaurant with a buffet lunch.

I wasn’t hungry myself, so we debated whether or not the proprietor would believe we weren’t pulling a fast one — a party of three paying for two all-you-can-eat meals.

“We might as well ask,” I said, expecting a not-unreasonable rejection. We entered the little hole-in-the-wall where the woman behind the counter greeted us in a kind and quiet manner, devoid of salesmanship. I asked my question, and, without weighing it, she assured me my non-customer presence would be no problem. I didn’t have to present an argument or plead my integrity.

Genesis

Twenty years ago (already!), I belonged to an activist church with a woman minister, gay leaders, and a social justice agenda. I chose it and similar organizations because my life of getting and spending, work and amusement, politics and personal life, felt empty and insufficient. So I took up a two-stranded way, spiritual and political, protests and potlucks, rallies and fund raisers, services and singing, meetings and celebrations. The church became an important community to me, but I needed further growth. Let me illustrate:

Our church owned and rented a tiny house to a woman and her teenaged son who were not parishioners. I lived close by, so they were my neighbors though I didn’t know their names and never introduced myself. At some point, I heard, the woman became ill with cancer, and then she died. Her son held a garage sale to raise funds; I browsed, but saw nothing I wanted and, with a vaguely uneasy feeling, walked away. Some weeks later, he came around selling Ginsu knives. I didn’t need knives, so I didn’t buy any. I don’t remember how many other attempts he made, but eventually he couldn’t make the rent and had to move out. That was the end.

At some point, I came to view this incident with horror, remembering my lack of response, the feeling I had that the situation was too bad but not my concern. I was focused on grand causes, so many ways to change the world that I could not help a neighbor even when he knocked at my door. Did it matter that I didn’t need an old kettle or Ginsu knives? Why couldn’t I have given money? Why couldn’t our whole church have put our heads and resources together to help? I’m sad and disappointed that our bottom line, the rent, prevailed over loving our neighbor and caring for the orphan, a literal neighbor, a literal orphan. It was almost a test case for living by principle, and I failed it. I remained passive (though sympathetic) in the face of need and pain; I often wonder if that struggling son thought, Churches and their ” love”: what a joke.

Big changes came about in both my personal and organizational life. I began to pay more attention. Those were the Reagan years when one effort after another came to heartbreaking failure. I began to ask the question: with all my hours of effort, all my meetings, whom exactly have I helped? Could I name one individual? I couldn’t – outside of family members. I became convinced that I needed to integrate long-term efforts with short-term acts and daily responses to unexpected opportunities, the kind that arise when heart and eyes are open. I wanted my destination and my journey to match. It’s a goal I still pursue.

This and my future posts on Tikkun Daily, then, represent an effort to remind myself and others of what small groups or individuals are doing right now and can do to heal and mend our local worlds, to celebrate the wonderful efforts we imperfect humans are capable of . May it strengthen us to– as the great French socialist, Jean Jaurès, put it –”live every day in a socialist state of grace,” to live now the battle that is “never won and never lost.”

Blessings on the journey!

Spotlight on Immigrant Service Day, August 29, 2009

In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.”

One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.” While on a peshat level the rabbis may be referring to the need for one to be earnest in his or her prayer in order for it to be supplicatory, I think there may be another level to their words.

Many religious leaders like to feel in control and give others advice. Though I am still a very much a rabbi-in-progress, with three-and-a-half years of study to go before ordination, I think it would show a great deal more strength for clergy to admit their shortcomings and be honest about how often they (and fairly soon soon we) don’t know what to do or how to do it.

In the spirit of seeking, rather than giving, advice, I wanted to share some of the fears that I have about my future career – and lifestyle – as a rabbi. I was recently asked to record these as part of a professional development course at Hebrew Union College but thought they might be of interest here and foment conversation about the difficult life’s choices that many religious leaders face.

“Nice guys finish last.” That’s what we believe in this country. Without that assumption, advertisers couldn’t sell their latest energy drink and “Turn Boys into Monsters” as Derrick Kikuchi told us yesterday. Because of this notion, boys are besieged with images from marketers and the media that they have to compete rather than cooperate, go for the selfish power play rather than take part in the team, and become a macho man rather than a pansy. It’s every man for himself, these commercials say. If you don’t look out for number one, you’ll lose.

Well, it turns out that we’ve got it all backwards in this patriarchal, heterosexist, individualistic, might-makes-right society. And I have to add, “Thank goodness!” Because as a woman, many people assume that I throw like a sissy before anyone even tosses me the ball.

Scientific evidence has been accumulating over the last twenty years that shows what should have been common sense before now — that instead of being hard-wired to be selfish, human beings have evolved to be compassionate and collaborative. The social scientists fostering this research call their new understanding “survival of the kindest” to distinguish it from the social Darwinism of the past. They’re showing that we’ve been successful as a species precisely because of our altruism, nurturance, and compassion.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from psychotherapist and online columnist, Allen Roland. Dr. Roland is best known for his work on the Unified Field. More information on Dr. Roland and the Unified Field can be found on his blog.

THE UNIFIED FIELD

The basic underlying and uniting force of the universe is a psychic energy field of love and soul consciousness (the Unified Field), which lies not only beyond time and space but also beneath our deepest fears ~ and whose principle property is the universal urge to unite.

Finding the Unified Field was an act of surrender. Owning and proving it has been an act of courage. Initially, it was surrendering to and embracing an alone little boy within myself who always knew this truth. Then it was a slow process of finding the courage to stand alone, own my truth, and speak it, regardless of the risks.

Let me make this clear – every tenet of my Unified Field is based on my own personal experience and my experience with my clients. Which is why it took eight years for me to fully prove it, after I had written it, and which is why I no longer call it a theory.

What follows are the three basic tenets of the Unified Field.