uuMomma

Tell me where I heard this phrase, would you? I incorporated it into my opening words (more like, charge to the congregation rather than opening words) and then into my part of the sermon, so I want to know where I read it before I used it. Any ideas?

Here’s how I started today:

A Leap of Commitment

In religious language and in popular culture, we hear people sometimes talk about taking “leaps of faith.” We hear of people who aren’t real sure that what they are about to do will pan out positively or negatively, but they decide to “take a leap of faith” that all will be well.

Sometimes it works out positively, sometimes not. But, as life goes, it always works out one way or another.
Today, I want to ask you to NOT take a leap of faith. Instead, I ask you to take a leap of commitment.
Leap into this faith–feet first.

• Commit to act in the name of love.
• Commit to act in the name of justice.
• Commit to act in the name of community.
• Commit to act.

This faith of ours is not a static faith. It is one that continues to move where and when it is needed. It is not a faith of the status quo, of going along to get along. No, it is a faith that continues to challenge us to make this world better, but not for ourselves alone. We are challenged to make this world better for those who are poor or oppressed. We are challenged to stand up for those without a community of power.

Because that is who we are. Together. A community of power. But only when we make that leap of commitment to this place, to each other and to our children, as well as to the nameless many who need someone, perhaps even us, to act on their behalf.

Those who struggle in China or in Burma (Myanmar) or in New Orleans, still, as a result of natural disasters compounded by willful and ignorant governments. Those whose lives are ripped apart by war, through the loss of a loved one, through the loss of the companionship of a loved one, through the loss of someone who comes home someone else entirely. Those who struggle in poverty whether it is here in Lake County, or next door in Porter County, or in South or Central Africa. Those who struggle with mental illness, their own or someone else’s. Those who work three jobs but still manage to go to bed hungry as they pay for housing, healthcare, and basic human services. Those who are simply unable to speak out for their own needs.

Let us be a community of power for them and all the other nameless many who need someone to speak and act on their behalf.

Let us leap then, together. Let us take this marvelous, tumultuous, and often wrenching leap of commitment. Like that leap of faith, when we leap into commitment, we may not be able to control what the outcome will be. But we control something: our own engagement with that future.

Let us, together, envision ourselves as that community of power and all that that can mean. And then, let us commit to being that community, and all that that can mean.

Let us leap, my friends, with open eyes and limber legs prepared for that bumpy landing—but a landing that shall be cushioned, always, by the love we find, here, in this community of power.

All I needed was a dose of perspective.  Thank you, Lizard Eater and Little Warrior. 

Mostly, when I watch these videos, I cry.*  This one made me laugh, made me realize how precious even the worst of days are.  Especially if you have “a brand new hat.”

*Don’t forget to do a good deed for Little Warrior. I haven’t yet. Been too self-involved. But I think I feel one coming on. Very soon.

I love this photo of my boy, Tiger.  There he is, in my chair, the morning sun crossing his face as he rests not only on my heating pad, but on my shawl, too.  It was really, really cold that day and I really, really wanted to be him.  Today, too.  Even though it was like 120 dgrees with humidity that would curl your hair (did curl mine, and not in a good way). It would be good to be a big hairy cat who is loved for the fact that he can look so damn happy just to be.  Most of the time.  I love this photo.  Love this cat.  Jealous as snot.  I want to be this cat.

There is work to do, and lots of it. But first, there is my favorite coffee, in my favorite mug, sitting in my favorite chair, facing east, while the sun rises in the place where there are no windows, but casting a rosy golden glow that creeps up toward the bluing sky in a corner of the place where there IS a window.

There is so much work to do.  So many things that can only be done by me, or so it seems.  But first, there is a cat who mews quietly at my feet, to whom attention shall be paid.  For her sake and for mine.

My head spins, considering all that this day will bring. But first, first I shall sit here in the early morning silence, girding my spirit, my will, and my resiliance here, with this cup of coffee, cup of sunshine, and cup of silence.

My heart aches as I find myself letting too much in, unable to process it all and turn it back out into the world in a way that makes sense, even if only to me. It aches because this is what I think I am able to do best: gather, sort, present. But every attempt lately has been thwarted by too many others wishing to do my work as I do it.  Sometimes, I do not play well with others.

But first, there is this: the gathering and sorting and presenting of my own heartaches and desires, my own conflicts with the work I have signed up to do as it conflicts and deflects me from the work I’m certain I’m called to.

There are deadlines to meet, that should have been met yesterday, but first, there is reflection and thanksgiving for the lovely day given me by my husband and my children in honor of my birth–compressed into just a few short hours, but done with such kindness that despite the squabble over the cake cutting (there was cake–and I didn’t make it!), I felt loved, honored, treasured in a way my whole being needed  despite my forgetting how very much it did.

There are tears to shed over this incredibly stressful time in my work life.  But first, there are tears to shed over the things I am missing here, in my family life.

But first, there is much work to be done.

The cyclops
was not felled
by the sword.
Myopic,
he did not see
it coming.

I don’t think I’ve ever voted in a presidential primary where the vote I cast actually meant anything.  A contested election, in May?  Never heard of it.

But here’s my question for you other states who have already been wooed and forgotten: whose picture was on the campaign materials from Hillary Rodham Clinton?

You would think that it would be her photo, wouldn’t you?  As I live in the northwest corner of Indiana, in one of those “sundown” towns you hear of, and where the once-great city of Gary was torpedoed by white-flight, I wonder why her black male opponent’s photo is on every piece of literature I receive from the Clinton campaign.  Whose strategy is this?

Anyone from a blue state receive stuff like this?  Am I overly sensitive?  You all tell me.

As my husband said last night, how bad does it have to be when a teen-age daughter complains that her parents are not paying enough attention to her?  After two nights of bellowing and belligerence (beyond the norm), I called my eldest daughter over to me and said, “what’s the deal?” as nicely as I could.

“It just seems like I’m way down on the list of priorities for you and dad right now,” she said, without pouting, without shouting, without tears.

I couln’t do much more than acknowledge that she was right.  That morning I’d spent a good portion of the hour-long shared commute, bemoaning  to my trapped passenger the very issue of being out of balance right now between family, work, and other. I told my daughter she was right, told her that I’m still playing catch-up with work, church and home in the aftermath of my father’s illness and death and of her father’s back surgery.  I told her what I’d told my husband last week as we had a pass-by snipe at each other.  I said, we can recognize that this is an incredibly busy, stressful time right now and yell and argue our way into making it moreso, or we can give each other some room, some space to be crazy, and a little bit of kindness and make it just bearably stressful.

When I reminded her that she, too, has been very busy (being in the school play, being the manager of the track team, and going to work with her dad on Saturdays), she nodded and agreed.

Here’s the image that came to me in one of my few quiet moments this week.  I suddenly felt the need to be shot out of a canon to catch up to my life, which seemed to have gone on without me these last few weeks, months.  But then I had the image of my landing after being shot out of that canon, whereupon I landed face-down, with a grizzly thud and the sickening realization that in the moment I landed and pulled myself upright, my life would have continued on without me, requiring a repeat of the previous process.

I’m trying to figure out how to model grief for my girls, as I’m sure that much of this slowness, this indecisiveness, this inability-to-focus-ness is part and parcel of the grieving process.  And still, I move forward…ish. And in trying to model the grief, I’m not letting them see the tears always at the inside corner of my eyes, but am letting the sadness eek through.  This eldest daughter has said to me on occasion in the last few weeks, “Are you alright?  You just look so sad.”  She’s paying attention.  “I am sad,” I say when she notices.  “And I’m alright.”

I still don’t know how to do this and wonder does anyone.  I am flabbergasted at how I am still taken aback by his death, as intellectually prepared for it as I was.  But there are these moments that seize my heart to breaking.  My daughter–still again the eldest–came to me one night as we had a house full of others and I saw she was upset so we went in my room to talk.  “We played the song we did at the concert,” she said, “and I thought of Poppa …” and she fell into her tears.  We had been at a school concert where each girl played the morning my father died.

Another day, my youngest said, out of nowhere, it seemed, “Debbie and I have one thing in common: we both only have one grandparent.”  We were driving.  Everyone else engaged her in follow-up conversation, I stared out the window thinking of another moment, the day before.  I was in the laundry room and the girls were folding kitchen towels, napkins and placemats.

“Where’d we get these?” one child asked of the rarely-used white placemats.

“Grandma and Grandpa Brown gave them to me for my wedding,” I said, and suddently felt a sickness through my heart, as I thought of my own daughters’ weddings and those who will not be there.

A week or so before that, at an airport, I watched an elderly couple help each other through security. She who seemed to be barely able to stand herself, was helping him on with his jacket. And then she put her arm through his and they walked on, slowly, together.  I felt, as I watched them, as I had when my girls were little and my mother-in-law died, when I saw a grandmother pushing a baby in a stroller as I drove the opposite way.  This is what will not be, I thought.  This will not be a part of their daily routines nor of their glorious days.  This is what will not be, for them, for her, for us.

But what will be, I have to remind myself to look forward with hope, as I have no regrets about what has happened, only about what will never happen.  I have to be reminded to look forward with the hope of what is, and stop living in the hoping of that which can never be.

I have to pull myself back to the now, to the moments when we are together as family, as individuals who love and sometimes even like each other.  Have to pull myself back to the tasks at hand and let my grieving soul sail on ahead, stare at the tulips blooming in the yard even as a gray day provides the backdrop to the reds, the yellows, the pinks.  Perhaps that’s it: I need to live in this gray place right now, while still paying attention, special attention, to those vivid spots of color that bloom firmly, yet briefly. 

But it is the gray where I live, for now.  It is a muted place, where my hearing is dulled as is my vision.  Even taste and touch are affected by the grayness.  My intellect, too, it would seem.  Some will tell me to give it “time” and some days I can hear this without cringing. But if now is all we have and now is when I hurt then how does waiting help that, how does that help me NOW.

It will, I know.  It will.  And I’m quite certain that the grayness right now is in direct proportion to the heightened sensitivity of those last few weeks of my father’s life.  Too many colors, too many sounds, too many tastes, too many touches.  Overdosed, I suppose on the intensity of living while another is dying or recently gone.

So I’ll sit in this muted place being drawn back, inch by inch, into my former life by the residents therein, who need me, need my attention, and need to see the grayness lift, inch by slow inch.

… but like to be reminded is out there.

see more crazy cat pics

Okay, Jacqueline, I have an answer:  What comfort, UU?  Well, it’s in the good comments of good folks responding to my father’s death.  People I don’t know who stop by my blog because I have UU attached to it.  People who offer kind words and encouragement and hugs … lots of cyber hugs.  For which I am grateful.

And then there was this: I purposely stayed away from church on Sunday because, quite honestly, I didn’t think I could, as my daughter said today “stand all that sympathy.”  It seems rather odd, but I just wanted to stay away from my church community, get on with the business I needed to attend to as I focused on the service we will have for my father, and spent a few hours alone.  Alone. 

And then I got the phone call, from a woman at church who teaches my daughters and had heard from them about my dad.  She’d skipped the service after RE and come home to fix us all a casserole.  And when I got her phone call, I cried for the first time since hearing the news of my father’s death.  “Oh, yes,” I remembered, “we do need to eat!”  More than that, it was a visceral response to someone providing care to me, my family—them they know and them they don’t.

Could this comfort come from a different religious home, one other than UU?  You betcha.  What matters is that it is my home and the people there have made me theirs.

So does this constitute being fed by my faith, or being fed by my faith community?  I would answer: yes.  The tenets of the faith bring the people who seek and strive and wish to be a part of the arc that bends toward justice.  But the faith is also the people, who show up–sometimes with casseroles.

I remember when I asked the minister what I could do for my friend Jim’s memorial service.  “Can you organize the food?” he asked.  My internal editor said “crap!” but my mouth said, “sure” with only the slightest grimace.  This was around the same time that my father was diagnosed with the terminal cancer, so my mind was a little betwixt and between, put in charge of the food (not my A game, there) for a friend’s memorial service, while dealing with my own father’s impendng death.  I did not know what to do, then finally made a series of announcements, asking people to please bring desserts or hors deouvers (this was not to be a meal, but “light refreshments”). 

Nervous for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t real sure if we were going to pull this one off.  Sure enough, I stood there, trying to make buckets of coffee and the food was not yet there, I started to sweat.  Really.  A lot.  And then, some cookies came.  And a cheese/meat tray.  Crackers and dip.  More desserts. And more.  And still more. So much more, we had to put up another table for the food.  People showed up to help and those who felt less connected to Jim than I (he was a mentor to me), urged me to leave the fellowship hall and be in the sanctuary for the service.

People came. They brought food.  They wished to be of service and they were. And it was a moment not unlike such moments in other churches all around the world, but it was my church community, my group of people—people who, on a typical day, will argue about definitions of words like “spirit” and “covenant”—showed up, with food, with comfort.

What do we hold on to in crisis?  I suppose the most tangible item for me to refer to at the moment is not the cross but the casserole.  But not just the casserole, but a faith that urges me not to look toward the skies when I seek heaven, but in the eyes of the person who hands me that casserole.  A faith that urges me to create heaven on earth, create the beloved community, create the place where death is neither ignored nor spoken of in terms of certainty where only speculation will do. A faith that connects me, sometimes in word, sometimes in deed, (and sometimes in casserole), with the source of us all.

Strange comfort. But comfort, indeed.

Jacqueline at Moxie Life is asking what comfort people find in the UU faith during crisis.  I get that.  She says:

The question is how does being UU help? What comfort is there in our religious faith. The quick answer, for me, is none. It actually leads to more questions then answers. I don’t feel comforted by my religious affiliation. There are no answers to my big questions. There is no practical advice or faith to fall back on.

I completely get what she is saying—I think; I do not derive any particular comfort from identifying myself as a Unitarian Universalist. We don’t really have a prayer we can say to ourselves in times of stress and crisis like other religions offer, do we?  For me, who lived unchurched most of my life, what being a part of this religious movement has given me is a framework for comfort.  I am comforted by the ritual of worship (which is why I become discomforted when it goes astray); comforted by song (participating in singing or watching the choir; I am often put off by sitting and listening to music being played from a CD, not sure why, but I drift and get pissy); comforted just by a well-crafted service, regardless of the topic.

I guess I’m one of those weird people who just like a good UU worship service: one that invites me into reflecting about issues large by inviting me into issues small and then expanding. There’s a rhythm to a really good service that provides that comfort I am seeking.  A cadence, I suppose, that weaves words with song, thought with emotion, the personal with the universal.

This, I understand, can be done through any religion.  Why I like a well-crafted UU sermon (even if I am only reading it) and why I find it comforting is that it does not tell me what I ought to do, what I ought to be, who (or what) I ought to be seeking comfort from.  It provides the framework for me to fill in the gaps for my own self.  It reminds me I am a part of a greater whole and reminds me that my suffering is not the only suffering in the world and that I can ease my suffering by connecting and consoling others. It reminds me to be a part of life, especially when I feel like retreating.  And, it does remind me I am not alone.  Who is with me may not be God, or Jesus, or the ghost of a loved one, but the love of that one—that love that does not die when the body does.

Is it the UU faith that does this for me?  Yes, and no.  And I realize that crises are not just about death, though that’s where I am right now.  When the message of love is preached, I feel comforted.  When the message of understanding is preached, I feel comforted.  When the message of meeting yourself in your own human form and loving yourself anyway is preached, then I feel comforted, too.  And I’m not sure I could get all this in the package I seek at a church of any other denomination.