Really Not About Me

I've noticed...so many times, when it feels like someone is making something about me, it really isn’t.

Often in these situations, it is then a function of my egoic needs, that ends up making what isn't about me, about me after all.

That thing I'm feeling from them is really about something going on for them.  This has happened over and over again—not every time, to be sure—but, still, over and over again.

Is this what it means for me to 'die to self'?  ...the need to manage how I think other people view me?

Release of Control

Based on years of spiritual direction, I have observed that conservatives must let go of their illusion that they can order and control the world through religion, money, war, or politics. True release of control to God will show itself as compassion and generosity, and less boundary keeping. Liberals, however, must surrender their skepticism of leadership, eldering, or authority, and find what is good, healthy, and deeply true about a foundational order. This will normally be experienced as a move toward humility and real community. 

-- Richard Rohr

15 Insane Photos from Northern California’s 2-Day Lightning Storm

The rest here....

Our Comfort

In respect of all that has happened before and after the significant events that took place 57 years ago today...

Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It's not a comfortable conversation for any of us.

-- Austin Channing Brown


"We the people..." is not primarily, in the end, a political process. The sooner we recognize that, the better.

"We the people..." are effectively deferring something that, apparently, only we can muster the fortitude to address.  Our commitment to personal comfort by handing things off to the government is terminal, because it too conveniently just gives us someone else to blame (if the political conventions the last two weeks haven't made that clear, then...well, you finish the sentence...).  This dynamic has become entrenched in demonization of whatever and whoever is on the 'other side'.

Nothing constructive is really happening, in this context.  We are spending all our resources just fortifying our bases (at both collective and personal levels).  Our politicians are just selling fear.  And, they are selling it to us because we're buying it.  Stop.Buying.Into.Their.Fear.

Continuing to defer, even via something like an election, is not a viable process towards change.

The people need to decide what they are going to do.  What am I going to do? is the operative question.  What are we the people going to do?

Our comfort is no longer an option.

All We Ever Really Have

All we ever really have is the present.

The present eclipses the past.

But, our awareness and presence in the current moment impacts our ability to do the same in the future...the next moment to be present to.

This is where the impacts of self-sabotage are the greatest.  They reduce our ability to be present in the next moment (future).

In this way, the past, present, and future are all one—each, an extension of the other.

But, it is possible to be highly unaware in the only moment we ever actually live in—the present one.

A shame when this happens, because the present is all we ever really have.

Self-Sabotage, Doom Scrolling, You're In Control Of The Clicker

We really can't help anyone else, if we are sabotaging our own selves.

"Well, I don't do that!"

Well...I'm guessing you do—because we all do, at least some of the time.

So, perhaps, we just need to learn how we, each in our own personal ways, sabotage ourselves. We can and need to learn to work at ways to prevent ourselves from doing so.


These may not be the most potent examples, but they likely identify some of the ways we self-sabotage:


Doom Scrolling

Being informed is a virtue. It helps us make better decisions and encourages us to take action.

Getting hooked on an endless scroll of media inputs is not the same as being informed. There’s long been a business model of urgent news (“man bites dog!”), but now it’s been leveraged, amplified and optimized to suck people in for hours at a time. And division is much easier to sell than progress.

If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?

-- Seth Godin

LT: Help Those Around

Leadership is not a journey to rise in the ranks. Leadership is a journey to help those around us rise.

-- Simon Sinek


It seems to me, we know who those around us are, that need to help rise.

Our ambivalence—“I don’t know what to do about everyone else...”—is an absence of leadership (among other things like compassion, humility, love).

Equation Changes

Ever noticed...how much the equation changes, if you pull politics out of it (not to mention how much the conversation changes)?

You are left with something far more human to work with—like what you get when you are genuinely listening, instead of talking all the time.

So, what is it that seems to enable listening more than anything else?  I would posit, compassion.

When compassion is not involved, you often get the opposite of listening...no respectful dialog between two parties—which is pretty much all we see right now in our collective political equation.

Unfortunately, it seems that even something like compassionate listening to another party (collective or individual) needs to be lead.  In other words, our leaders must demonstrate and, in so doing, teach by example how to do this...how to be this.  And this requires something of all us, that currently seems to be quite lacking; humility.

Intuitively, I think we know something is terribly wrong about the current approach.  It has become just too easy for us to end up in the "they're the ones who are wrong, not me" ditch.  (By the way, have you heard how evil "they" are...?  Besides, the more we can talk about "them", especially with people like me or who think like "we" do, the better I can feel about myself....  OMG!  I hope you can sense the sarcasm here.  Unfortunately, even though this seems like a human-race problem, it makes it worse when it is believers who seem to fly this flag the highest.)

We cannot be compassionate, if we have never been willing to be humbled.

Is this why it feels doubly hard to change the equation?

The Wise Listen

let the wise listen and add to their learning,
    and let the discerning get guidance

-- Proverbs 3:5

Wait, but don't they already have it?


"The moving ever shall stay,” [twelfth-century Hindu mystic and poet] Basava said. Those words contradict so much of our inherited religious sensibility. “Stay the same. Don’t move. Hold on. Survival depends on resistance to change,” we were told again and again. “Foment change. Keep moving. Evolve. Survival depends on mobility,” the Spirit persistently says. . . .

-- Brian McLaren

Voting: Rs, Ds

[T]his president and those in power — those who benefit from keeping things the way they are — they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter.

That’s how they win. ... That's how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all.

We can't let that happen. ... Don’t let them take away your democracy.

-- Barack Obama

If you're from Indiana, check your voting status, click here....

Now and Then

'Poem for the week' -- "Now and Then":

“All life is built from song”
   In youth’s young morn I sang;
And from a top-near hill
   The echo broke and rang.

The years with pinions swift
   To youth’s high noon made flight,
“All life is built from song”
   I sang amid the fight.

To life’s sun-setting years,
   My feet have come—Alas!
And through its hopes and fears
   Again I shall not pass.

The lusty song my youth
   With high-heart ardor sang
Is but a tinkling sound—
   A cymbal’s empty clang.

And now I sing, my Dear,
   With wisdom’s wiser heart,
“All life is built from love,
   And song is but a part.”

-- Charles Bertram Johnson

Expertise

Expertise is not as much what you know, but how you apply what you know.

Where To Look, What To See

Another school-year has begun; what a privilege to watch my wife teach this way year after year.

100 years ago today: Women win right to vote

The bulletin moved just after 1 p.m. on Aug. 18, 1920, conveying the breaking news that the 19th Amendment had been ratified giving women the constitutional right to vote.

The AP had been covering the slow progress toward suffrage around the country as state after state ratified the amendment in 1920, culminating with Tennessee’s approval that put it past the threshold to become law.

The initial AP wire dispatches that day included jubilant reaction from around the country, including telegrams of congratulations from White House cabinet secretaries to the Tennessee governor.  Continue here...


It is interesting (and necessary) to note what gets left out of our historical narratives (see visual history here); the implementation of the constitutional amendment, in practical terms, allowed WHITE women to vote.


The 19th Amendment did not, however, guarantee any woman the vote. Instead, laws reserving the ballot for men became unconstitutional. Women would still have to navigate a maze of state laws—based upon age, citizenship, residency, mental competence, and more—that might keep them from the polls.  

The women who showed up to register to vote in the fall of 1920 confronted many hurdles. Racism was the most significant one. The 15th Amendment expressly forbade states from denying the vote because of race. But by 1920, legislatures in the South and West had set in place laws that had the net effect of disenfranchising Black Americans. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses kept many Black men from casting their ballots. Unchecked intimidation and the threat of lynching sealed the deal. With the passage of the 19th Amendment, African-American women in many states remained as disenfranchised as their fathers and husbands.

Nevertheless, in fall 1920, many Black women showed up at the polls. In Kent County, Delaware, their numbers were “unusually large,” according to Wilmington’s News Journal, but officials turned away Black women who “failed to comply with the constitutional tests.” In Huntsville, Alabama, “only a half dozen Black women” were among the 1,445 people of all races and genders who were registered, recounted Birmingham’s Voice of the People, an African-American newspaper. The explanation was clear: Officials applied “practically the same rules of qualification to [women] as are applied to colored men.”  Continue here....

Intuition vs Paranoia

I'm wondering...about the relationship between two words (representing two ideas)—intuition and paranoia.

Given what seems to engage either one, what distinguishes each from the other?

Put Down That Spiritual Gifts Quiz

The composition of spiritual gifts in the local church can look a lot like a meal in the fellowship hall. Sometimes, the church has an abundance of preachers and teachers. Other times, it has no one to fill in when the Bible study leader is sick. Sometimes, the church has plenty of people to cook and clean for the elderly. Other times, it struggles to find any. A church may have dozens of ministry organizers to every one person who can make the coffee, or 15 nursery volunteers to every one who wants to do evangelism. And in many churches, it can feel like a few people have all the gifts, and the rest of us barely have one.

For a generation of Christians versed in personality inventories and enneagram numbers, this environment can feel disorienting and even disappointing. Shouldn’t the gifts and graces in the church be more evenly distributed? Shouldn’t we be able to categorize the gifts in our midst? And shouldn’t our local body contain them all?

Of course, the church is tasked with recognizing and utilizing congregants’ gifts, and the enneagram and other analysis tools can be useful toward that end. But ultimately, God’s desire is to see us look less toward ourselves and more toward the Spirit’s work in our gathered midst. He wants us to set aside our own ideas of what a balanced church looks like...continue here.

-- Megan Hill

COVID-19 - Con't...

Less and Less Interested

I've noticed...I am less and less interested in what people, who get paid just to talk, have to say.

Give me a break (please!); do you think we're that stupid?

There will always be politics, I guess. But, that doesn't mean that we don't have to get tired of it, especially when its sole purpose seems to end up being more about the perpetuation of itself, than anything else.


I am more and more interested in what people, who actually do something, have to say.

What You Did

 In the end, what you did will be overshadowed by how you did it.

The Great Conversion

We spend much of our lives avoiding things, often subconsciously, that we have negatively experienced; things we don’t want to be perpetuated on us or on to someone else.

The vital turn is when we can begin to live for what we want—what we want to be for—rather then simply what we don’t want (or are against).

This is the great conversion that we all must choose to experience.

On the Lighter Side: I Can't Remember...

On the Lighter Side:

What If: Nothing Else To Say

What If...there is nothing else to say?

Sometimes, this can happen rather suddenly.  In a conversation, an awkward pause; uh oh, what to talk about now?

At another level, something like this can also brood under the surface of our lives as a kind of despondent nothing-newness.  If nothing new can be said, what else is there to do?

But, consider this; why is it that we tend to believe that what makes something valuable is that it is new? 

What about the value of repeating something that has been said before, perhaps even a long time ago?  Of saying it again?  Of saying it now, at this time?

What If...the doing of that were all the value in the world after all?

It has been said, there is "nothing new under the sun".  So, it would seem that what we say next, is what really matters....

The Problems We See

Peaceful change starts within us and grows incrementally from where we are. Our social and physical location will influence the problems we see and the solutions we can imagine. We must “think globally and act locally”.

-- Richard Rohr

Your Income Predicts How Well You Can Socially Distance

NOW MORE THAN ever in the US, your money defines you. If you’re rich, you’ve splurged on enough canned food and TP to ride out several pandemics, let alone Covid-19. As the start of the school year approaches, perhaps you’ve hired tutors for your kids. Maybe you’ve decamped to your country compound to hunker down and escape the masses. But if you’re poor, you may be stuck taking public transport to your essential job. Without much savings in the bank, you have to make frequent trips to the grocery story to get supplies little by little.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that scientists now have the data to show that Americans with low income have been more mobile during the pandemic than the wealthy, potentially exposing themselves to a greater risk of infection.

People have been talking about Covid-19 as a sort of equalizer: If you’re a human, you can get it. The virus is so vicious, sometimes the best health care that money can buy still isn’t enough to fend off death. Rich or poor, the virus doesn’t give a damn. But that’s conflating lethality (or how likely a person is to die from the virus) with exposure risk (or how likely a person is to be infected in the first place). “I'm not really sure where that came from, except that people always say this about catastrophes, and it's never true,” says Noymer. “Some people said, ‘Well, Tom Hanks can get it, and anyone can get it.’ But that doesn't mean that anyone will get it, or that or that Mr. Hanks and people in his tax bracket are equally likely to be affected by it.”

It’s critical to note that 43 percent of essential workers are people of color, says Chandra Farley, director of the Partnership for Southern Equity’s Just Energy program. “We sometimes automatically characterize people as vulnerable, without saying they are made to be more vulnerable to certain things because of systemic racism and historic inequities,” Farley says. “People are not low-income. People earn lower incomes because they’ve been marginalized, in a lot of cases, into earning low wages because of their essential work.”

Not all essential workers get health insurance from their jobs, and that’s another underlying factor in the disparities among who is most vulnerable to the virus. The Covid-19 mortality rate for Black Americans is 3.7 times higher than the rate for white Americans, due in large part to unequal access to health care. Latinx people are 2.5 times more likely to die of the disease than white people. In San Francisco, the divide is particularly stark: One study in the city's Mission neighborhood found that 96 percent of those who tested positive were Latinx, even though that group only accounted for 40 percent of participants. Fully 90 percent said they couldn't shelter in place at home.  Continue here....

-- Matt Simon

Wild Geese

'Poem for the week' -- "Wild Geese":

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

You Only Know

You only know as much as you do.

-- St Francis of Assisi

Just As Important

Everything going on in your world right now is just as important to you as what is going on in my world right now is to me.

The irony is that at any given moment, those can be very different things.

Success, excitement, joy, pleasure, peace for one, at any given moment can be failure, boredom, sadness, pain, and turmoil for another...at the same time.

Both, though, are just as important as the other and we can seek to hold the paradox of very differing realities.  If we can't though (which appears to be too much the case); the consequences can be devastating, at both personal and collective levels.

Desirable & Frightening

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested from a crutch.

-- James Baldwin

A Measure

Ever noticed...why using consistency as a measure of the quality of something is so attractive to us?

It seems to be the case for both things and people.  The problem is the value that we can sometimes associate with it, particularly when it comes to people.

Perhaps it is precisely people’s inconsistencies that we should be valuing....

Not To Come At All

Some people think God does not like to be troubled with our constant coming and asking. The way to trouble God is not to come at all.

-- D.L. Moody


What does it look like for you...to come to God?

Top Political Concerns