Angels Amidst the Dark

I remember Christmas Eve services at Northminster Presbyterian Church in Endwell, New York. My father was the minister and I was in high school. My friends and I would sit in the same pew rather than with our parents. At the time, we were quite cool and utterly unaware of our shining youth and hopefulness. We were the gang—Steve and Jeff and Kathy and Lynne – the boys and the girls and the endless longing in between.

I did love the singing. Angels We Have Heard on High – ‘singing sweetly o’er the plain, and the mountains in reply, echoing their joyous strain’. The words and melody appear magically in my mind. Like my father after his stroke. When words had fled, he and I practicing slow walking down the corridor. One day I began to sing an old family song – a camp song. And my father who could barely shuffle his feet and had not spoken for days, smiled hugely and began singing with me – word perfect.

So even now the music and words of Christmas Eve are with me. Singing still, together in the dark night, listening to the familiar and comforting readings about ‘certain shepherds.’ Nowadays I wonder how certain they were. Those men in the cold fields watching over their flocks by night. When the angel of the Lord appeared and said ‘Fear not.’

Fear not. The angels of life are terrible and wonderful—descending and vanishing in their own times and places. Dark and light alternating endlessly. Fear not, for I bring you tidings of great joy. Fear not. In the midst of the dark and cold life and love itself are being born.

But I’m trying to get to the end of the service at Northminster—the part where we sang Silent Night. My father was talking about Christmas the day he died. He kept apologizing for ruining it. I found out later that in his middle family, it was a time of drinking and fits of terrible anger and depression. Not so lovely. But the attending minister at the hospital suggested we sing ‘Silent Night’ – and we did – his first family and his third family joining in together around his hospital bed. Minus the second family and our mother from the first family who weren’t invited.

I didn’t mean to get lost in the darkness of my father’s death again, but it is very present with me. Now his life AND his death are part of the story. The light and love he gave me. His passing was the loss of one of my biggest supporters – someone who never tired of telling me how proud he was of me, who I had become and what I had accomplished. And also the dark gifts – the family legacy of the terrible loneliness and longing – the breaking of vows and sacred trusts. All of this passed on to me.

But on Christmas Eve, at Northminster Church in the mid-1960’s, we would each have a small candle with a round circle of paper half-way up to (supposedly) catch the drips. My glowing father would light his candle from the altar and pass it on down the center aisle of the church and from there down each row until everyone who was old enough to stand on their own two feet would be holding a lit candle.

And then, my father, his face alight with joy above his black robe, would say some magic words to invite everyone to lift their candle up. And the whole sanctuary would glow – bright as day. Angels everywhere.

Call to Action

I recently read the transcript of a talk by Paula Green given on December 7^th in Northampton, Massachusetts: “Despair and Empowerment in Our Watershed Moment.” Paula is a peace activist, founder of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding and recipient of a 2009 “Unsung Hero of Compassion’ awarded from the Dalai Lama.

She spoke of the election exit polls that reported one in five people who voted for Trump didn’t believe he was qualified to be president. In reflecting on what causes people to act in such a desperate way she turned to the issues of respect and humiliation, saying: “The felt sense of being respected, or its opposite of being ignored or humiliated, has a much more powerful influence on people’s opinions than rational arguments…The pain of being humiliated and excluded is unsustainable. Sooner or later, shame seeks a scapegoat, someone to blame in a misguided attempt to reduce the pain. The excluded demand their place at the table.”

She goes on to say: “I watched this play out so viciously in the former Yugoslavia during my years of intensive engagement in that region. Milosevic, an opportunist demagogue, rose up by cleverly appealing to the grievances of one ethnic group in the region, promising them status, prosperity, and glory. Demonizing all the other ethnic and religious groups, especially the Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, he slowly tightened the noose, inciting and baiting his followers to commit plunder, murder, and war crimes. The parallels are chilling, the lessons are clear.”

Trump certainly is “an opportunist demagogue.” He has been utterly consistent in his disregard for shared standards of truth and his relentless undercutting of reasoned discourse. He has come to power through fanning the flames of grievance in those who have felt unseen and disrespected. He dependably points the finger of blame on Muslims, Mexicans and people who ‘are not like us.’

How do we, as Paula Green says “enlarge our boundaries of inclusion?” How do we join with those who have felt so disrespected and left behind by our country? A friend who voted for Trump is also appalled by the racism and violence he incites and suggested we might form a ‘coalition of the reasonable’ to protect those who are vulnerable.

How do we go beyond being shocked and outraged and begin forming new coalitions and taking strategic action? This is not the time for playing nice and pretending everything will take care of itself. All of us who pay lip service to compassion, democratic principles and economic justice need to being behaving in new ways.

Ms. Green challenges us all saying: “Governments cannot last without the acquiescence of the governed. If we are determined not to acquiesce, give up, give in, normalize, or cooperate, and* we are equally determined to become more inclusive and to remain nonviolent, our revolution will triumph over obstacles that otherwise will threaten and divide us.”

*my emphasis

A Matter of Perspective

Our human minds are designed to compare one thing to another.   This wonderful capacity allows us to buy groceries and build electric cars but also leads us into a near constant state of dissatisfaction. We often wish that things were different: It’s too hot or too cold. I’m too anxious or too tired. Our team should have won the game. Our woman should have won the election.

Since we can imagine that things could be or should be different, we often think that someone must have done something wrong to get us here. It might be us or it might be others, but someone is to blame. We can spend a lot of time looking to find who is at fault. Or we spend a lot of time wishing that things were different—regretting the past and complaining about the present.

But what if this is it? What is our current situation (inside and outside) is not a mistake that should have been avoided, but it is exactly where we need to be? What if our whole lives have led up to this moment and if we are the ones who have what is needed to meet the current challenges? Or what if the conditions around us are exactly what we need to wake up to our birthright of freedom and power?

From a scientific perspective, these are not testable hypotheses. We cannot ‘prove’ that things, as they are, are an opportunity rather than a trial. But we appear to have the freedom to approach them from either perspective – and many others as well.

Whatever perspective we hold on our current situation, it probably serves us well at least to be aware of it: What is the story I am telling about where I am now? Without being aware that our perception of any situation includes some creative assumptions, we experience our personal view as fixed reality rather than one of many possibilities.

As we become aware of the multiple views that are inherent in any given situation, we can sometimes choose new possibilities for ourselves and for the world we live in. We will continue to struggle and complain, but maybe we can find more ease and be more effective in our actions as well.

On Days Like This

The sun will rise over our neighbor’s rooftop to the southeast and shine right into my face in the middle of our second round of morning meditation – right around 7:45. It will rise on a low diagonal trajectory and soon be lost behind a tree trunk and the window’s lattice. Our sitting will end just before 8:00 and we will chant the four Bodhisattva vows. Then at 10:44, winter solstice will officially arrive.

This is shortest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere. The solar powered light we installed over the Temple stairs is now receives only enough power to function intermittently. The gardens lie frozen and fallow. This is winter, or rather, just the beginning of winter. Though it has always puzzled me that the sun should be rising in the sky and the days growing longer as the winter grows deeper. Brighter and colder coming.

But today is the darkest. It matches my mood. The fall of Aleppo and the continuing Syrian tragedy. The truck rampage in Berlin and the random acts of terror that appear to be part of our new normal. The actions of DT that reinforce my fears that his will be an authoritarian administration that feels entitled to disregard any and all democratic processes. Everywhere I look there is suffering and the foreboding of worse to come.

I try to remind myself that sometimes human beings feel depressed and discouraged. This is not new and may even be a rational response to a world on fire. I can’t fix things and I don’t have to pretend it’s all OK. These are dark times. This is a dark day.

On days like this, I try to remember to narrow my focus. There is so much to despair about and so much I cannot change. But I can make my bed and straighten my room. (I’m sure this brings a smile to my mother’s face.) I can be kind to myself and to the people I meet. I can continue take steps to strengthen the relationships that support positive work in the world. I do my best to open my heart to this suffering world and try to remember to appreciate the grace of each breath and the miracle of the sun rising on a cold day.

Just One Thing

When the time comes
to say one last thing,
sing one further song,
make one final choice,
how will it be?
On that last certain day
when so little is left—
what will you say?

Maybe you will have
run out of options on
the white bed bound with
respirator mask pulled
too tightly on tender skin.
Maybe you can’t remember
where you are but familiar
voices say your youngest
daughter is on her way
to see her father and you choose
to wander on a little longer.

Perhaps finally
you wish to speak
the dark secrets
that have cost so much.
Or your final words open
you to joy concealed
and now revealed.

But for now, this certain day
in the great rush of being,
in advance of the conclusion,
what is the one thing
you will choose to say,
to be, to sing?

Uncertain Probabilities

Nate Silver became a prominent political forecaster with his wildly accurate prediction of Obama’s 2012 Presidential victory. His web site, FiveThirtyEight, gave Obama a 90% chance of winning the Electoral College. He also correctly predicted the results of the Presidential election in every state that year.

Silver’s political predictions are always framed with probabilistic language. Through most of 2016, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a reassuringly high chance of winning the Presidency. But even then Silver reminded his audience that a high probability is no a sure thing. The chances of surviving in Russian roulette may be quite good, but no reasonable person risks their life on good odds.

By election day, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton somewhere around an 70% chance of being elected our next President. 70% means that seven times out of ten, in a similar situation, she would win the election. But seeing as there is only one election, a probabilistic prediction can be right and feel wrong at the same time. Technically, a probabilistic prediction can be considered correct in any outcome as long as the odds were between 1% and 99%.   The only way to judge the ‘accuracy’ of a prediction is over time and is of little consolation in this world of singularity.

In his thought-provoking book THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T, Silver writes: “The amount of information was increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths. Paradoxically, the result of having so much more shared knowledge was increasing isolation along national and religious line. The instinctual shortcut we take when we have ‘too much information’ is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.’ (page 3)  

Silver is referring not to the internet, but to the invention of the printing press, which he claims was one of the prime contributors to the next 200 years of wars between religions and nationalities. Whether historians would agree or not, his observation that more information can actually lead to a narrowing of perspective rather than a broadening, feels true to our time of false news cycles, tweets and information hacks.

In THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE, Silver points out the poor track records of most predictions: many ‘expert’ predictions are ‘barely better than random chance’ and the clarity and specificity of a prediction may have a negative correlation to its accuracy. Silver engagingly educates us in the ways of uncertainty, risk, chaos and complexity. Reading the book, we can become better consumers of information and perhaps even a little more at home in this probabilistic and unpredictable world.

Waiting and Watching

Our President-Elect, whose name I am increasingly reluctant to say, will clear one more hurdle on Monday with the vote of the Electoral College. While I think the members of the College should break ranks and vote against the presidency of this incompetent and dangerous demagogue, this will not happen. And even if it did, it would only throw the election into the Congress which would promptly confirm the current candidate rather than face the terror of a Democratic president.

There’s nothing to do now except wait, watch and not get lost in numbness or fear. The time will come soon enough when we will be called on to stand up and act.

I recommend two pieces for you media diet today:

• Gail Collins’ op-ed essay in the New York Times yesterday about Trump’s self-imagined bromance with Putin.Trump & Putin, in the Barn
• Saturday Night Live’s cold opening last night with the wonderful Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon about Putin coming for Christmas.S.N.L. Trump Chistmas

Both pieces are disturbing and humorous. I guess that is about as good as it gets these days.

Winter Prayer

Secretly, I always pray
for snow—lots and lots
of snow. I long for the high
mounds and deep banks—
for the innocent fluffy descent
that defeats the orderly intentions
of angry plows and easily shackles
the rushing cars to slowness
and creep. Now no urgency
on earth can defeat the downward
reign of whiteness. Schools everywhere
close and parents are allowed again
to see their children. At home, only
essential people are called out,
while the rest of us snuggle up
together in this great white world
with only a few good books
and a cup of tea.

Who Is This Strange Man In Our Midst?

The reality of the impending Trump presidency is sinking in and I am finding it difficult to remain both open and suspicious. My natural tendency is to put Trump into the ‘danger to democracy’ category and then interpret everything he does or says in that light. This may be true, but I also know the world is not simply black and white and I want to be as flexible and effective as I can in meeting what is arising.

How do we see a situation clearly without limiting its full possibilities with our rigid expectations? Byron Katie says that we can fight reality all we want, but reality always wins. But we often confuse our perspective on reality with reality itself.   Is Trump a pathological liar with narcissistic personality disorder or is he a ruthless politician who just wants power or is he an agent of change who wants to disrupt the status quo and create an America that works for everyone?

It’s probably helpful to hold a number of simultaneous positions. Each one of us contains multitudes. But depending on a pathological liar to tell the truth is an exercise in futility. We should observe closely and see the patterns and work with what is rather than what we wish were true.

A friend recently sent Melissa an article called ‘Coping with Chaos in the White House*.’   The author claims to have a lot of experience dealing with people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). And while Trump may or may not suffer from this very real condition, and this author may or may not be a true ‘expert’ in this field, his/her suggestions on how to deal with someone with NPD seemed both accurate and helpful in thinking about living with our new President Elect.

I recommend the whole article*, but a few of the helpful things she/he said about living with someone with NPD:

1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.

4) Entitlement is a key aspect of the disorder. As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office. He has already stated that rules don’t apply to him. This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents.

6) It’s very, very confusing for non-disordered people to experience a disordered person with NPD. While often intelligent, charismatic and charming, they do not reliably observe social conventions or demonstrate basic human empathy. It’s very common for non-disordered people to lower their own expectations and try to normalize the behavior. DO NOT DO THIS AND DO NOT ALLOW OTHERS, ESPECIALLY THE MEDIA, TO DO THIS. If you start to feel foggy or unclear about this, step away until you recalibrate.

So I offer this resource this morning as one more perspective, one more tool for us as we live into the new reality of our country’s formal leadership.

*Coping With Chaos

Just Now

The full moon is hanging clear in the dark sky of the early winter morning. It’s twenty-five degrees and predicted to get colder all day until the temperature is zero by tomorrow morning. Welcome to winter in New England.

Another winter morning twenty-five years ago I was in Maine on a dog sled expedition with Outward Bound. The temperature was ten below zero. The snow was shockingly loud as I trudged a short distance from the tent to pee in the still darkness of early morning. Every part of my body felt sick with cold, lack of sleep and fear. I was sure my feet would never be warm again. How would I find the strength to meet the rigors of the trip? I saw no way out of this fearful place. And we were still at base camp.

A brisk walk in my four-layered insulated mouse boots and a bowl of hot cereal with lots of brown sugar was enough to warm my body and revive my spirits. The rest of the trip was a journey of beauty into the white forests and frozen lakes of the north country. There were a few other challenging moments, but I most remember the enthusiasm of the dogs as the pulled the sled which held our food and camping gear. And laughing with each other as we struggled like turtles to right ourselves each time we fell on our cross-country skis. Who knew that having a large pack on your back would so radically alter the physics of the problem? And I remember one afternoon when the temperature rose up into the mid-twenties. The sun was bright and the wind was calm. At the crest of a hill overlooking the frozen white lake, we stripped down to one or two layers and basked in the warmth of the afternoon.

It’s all relative.

The essential question for the human mind is: ‘Compared to what?’ Tall refers to short. Warm is only meaningful when we know what cold is. Our language and our analysis of a situation is a product of comparison: how is this moment like and unlike other situations I have known?

But the essential question for the human heart is: ‘What is this?’ When we hold the direction of this question and don’t fall off into analysis and comparison, we can find our way into the aliveness of each moment. Along with our wondrous capacity for analysis, we are invited to find our home in the moment that has never happened before. The singularity of THIS is an unparalleled opportunity to find our place right where we are.