​My morning prayer is a jumble of practices: silence, chanting/reading a psalm, contemplation of a sacred text, even journaling, all in the name of “gazing into God.” Anything could pop up and surprise the hell out of me.
 
Recently, that anything involved a passage in Psalm 44 that could have been ripped from today’s editorials. That wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was what I was asked to do with it.
 
The psalm begins with praise to God for help in victories, defense against enemies, etc. (I’m using Nan Merrill’s compelling version of the psalms in her book Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness.) Then the text takes a dark turn:
 
Without your saving grace, we come in conflict with our neighbors,
We fear all who seem different from us.
We seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations,
We become arrogant and greedy.
Our spirit weakens as we attack others; we become deaf and blind
To the cries of those oppressed,
At the sight of those wronged.
 
Doesn’t this sound like America’s public square in 2024? Goodness knows, my adversaries “fear all who seem different.” Much of Donald Trump’s platform sounds like “we seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations.” My God, we are a mess, all right.
 
But then a voice popped up in my head: That’s not good enough. You’ve got your own work to do.
 
So I went through the passage again. After each line I asked myself and/or God, How am I like this?
 
The answers weren’t hard to see. “We fear all who seem different from us”: maybe many MAGA folks fear others who aren’t white, Christian, or heterosexual, but I fear the MAGA folks. “We become arrogant”: I sure do, especially when trying to defend one of my cherished (and, naturally, correct) opinions. “Our spirit weakens as we attack others”: I’m reminded of that sense of needing a shower after a long bitchfest about “them.”
 
I didn’t resolve to do anything about these shortcomings. For the time being, I just want to hold them, look at them, as a deep reminder that I am part of the problem too. If that truth makes its way to my heart, just maybe I move a tiny bit further toward being part of the solution.
 
Small potatoes, yes. What if every American did this?

​One day recently, while reading the work of other writers, I ran across an essay that took my breath away. The vivid imagery, the flow, the use of language: it absorbed me from the start and wouldn’t let me go. The author’s bio noted she’s published in many top literary journals—way, way more “top” than I have.

I was so bedazzled I wrote her an email in praise of her writing. She thanked me for the note and said she was saving it “to read on the hard days.”

And my lizard brain thought, What hard days? She’s got it made! A major literary success!

This kind of thing ever happen to you?

So many of us, from what I’ve seen, are Jedi masters at comparing ourselves with others, evaluating our worth against theirs, the better to place ourselves on some arbitrary hierarchical ladder of quality. I do this and end up with a pile of worthless wishes: I wish my writing were as good as hers; I wish I had x credential; I wish I’d “made it” like her so the “hard days” wouldn’t happen.

But the hard days happen to everyone. (I know, no surprise. But I forget.) Every human being, if they’ve lived long enough, has endured loss, trauma, intense pain, tragedy, the dreck of life. Those things are hard—excruciating—no matter who experiences them.

Here’s why I’m writing this. We’re at a point in history where certain groups live with the legacy of unimaginable horror. Black Americans and Indigenous folks, notably, continue to endure the shadows of slavery and genocide. The resulting pain, and the pain of other groups that have lived with oppression, merit the utmost compassion and listening, always.

And, at the same time, what if we extend that utmost compassion and listening to everyone? What if we keep in mind that they, like us, have experienced the brutal knocks life dishes out? I find that when someone mentions the difficulties in their own lives, my heart automatically opens to them, and out flow empathy, love, all manner of good things.

Acting this way one-on-one is a tiny act of kindness. But what if we start tiny—and set our hearts to lead with compassion? What might happen to our world?

Yes, the systemic oppression and centuries of ingrained behavior need more than listening and compassion; they need resolution. But leading with the clarity that everyone has hard days, and years, and lifetimes: that’s something my tiny one-person’s self can do now. Perhaps it can even grease the wheels for the much harder, more relentless work of justice.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think. 

[I’ve made] a new resolution, to write these few lines [in this diary] every day.      --The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, May 30, 1937

​Dorothy’s diary jumps from August 1937 to June 1938.      —ibid., ed. note, 1938
 
In other words: Dorothy Day, one of the deepest, most beloved, most accomplished Catholics of the twentieth century, failed—more than once—in much the same way I do on a regular basis.

My failure lies in weekly church attendance. We love the 8:00 a.m. Sunday service at our local Episcopal parish. But Saturday is chore day. When I overdo the chores—which is nearly always—I exhaust what little energy long COVID allots to me. Therefore, zero energy for church.

I should just acknowledge this to myself, but I don’t. Instead, guilt is a regular feature of my early Sunday mornings. Maybe this week…I’ve got half an hour, and if I shower quickly…but I get dizzy when I walk around…but God wants me to go (I presume)…so let’s try eating breakfast…no, that didn’t help…

You know the gig?

Recently, during my daily prayer time, I ran across the editor’s note above in Day’s published diary, and I couldn’t help laughing. Dorothy’s failure tells me I need a new mindset. Enough with the useless guilt. I’ll get to church if I can. I won’t if I can’t. I won’t stop trying, because church is an anchor for me. Dorothy, though she often failed to keep a diary, never stopped trying. I know this because the editor’s note is on page 31, her diary is 700 pages long, and apparently that’s the abridged version.

If unproductive guilt is part of your landscape as it is mine, I hope this helps. Life’s too short for that. I know that productive guilt is actually a thing, and maybe I’ll write about it someday if I ever experience it for myself. For now, though, I’ll just do what I can, as best I can, and I welcome you to do the same. 

I’m tallish by American standards (six foot one), which makes me a target for certain requests in grocery stores. They go like this: a total stranger of diminutive stature—always a woman, I’m not sure why—wants to grab a box of Shredded Wheat for her family. The store, however, has placed it on the top shelf, way out of her reach. She spies me headed her way. Guess what she thinks next:

1. (to herself) “Hmm. Person approaching. Tall. Bet they can reach the Shredded Wheat.” (out loud) “Excuse me….”
2. (to herself) “Hmm. Person approaching. Long hair, is that a woman’s shawl he’s wearing? Probably votes Biden. No way. We’ll have Cocoa Puffs again.”

This is probably not as slam-dunk as I’d like it to be. Surely there are people who would never ask for help from a person of another race, or gender, or political persuasion. But from what I’ve seen as a white, nonbinary center-lefty, Shredded Wheat wins every damn day.

I’ve been paying close attention to this lately, and not just in grocery stores. The people who make our weekly calzone always banter a little with me. The guys at the town dump share a joke. An older woman says “thank you” when I hold the door open for her; sometimes a young man does too.

Almost without fail, if they interact at all, it’s polite, pleasant, even warm. Call it a bond of the everyday: the dozens of tiny but civil interactions that, just for a second or two, tie us together. They’re every bit as substantial as the comment from the troll who flamed you on Twitter the other day. More so if the troll posted anonymously.

Here’s why I’m writing this. You may have noticed that, um, Americans are a tad miffed at one another. And by a tad miffed I mean raging, bulge-eyed, heart-attack-inducing furious. Some of them are talking about civil war. You know the situation. There seems to be nothing to bring us together again.

But what if we start small--really small, with the bonds of the everyday (among other things)? And maybe a shift in focus too, as in, we start paying as much attention to these warm and happy exchanges as we do to the race baiting and cancelling and whatnot on social media? What if we set our hearts on those everyday bonds?

This may sound Pollyanna to some. And of course it won’t solve everything. But the reconciliation’s got to start somewhere. You’ve got thoughts; I’d love to hear them. Bonus points if you can help me see, thoughtfully, where I’m wrong. 

My current spiritual practice includes, among other things, the excruciatingly slow reading of the Bible and other wisdom texts. I typically read a paragraph, or a few verses, per day; that’s plenty to sit with in silent prayer and ponder the depths that the passage may hold.

This year I began reading The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day in this way. (If you don’t know Dorothy Day, you can start here to get acquainted with her—a writer, journalist, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, tireless advocate for pacifism and against poverty, etc.) Today, quite by accident, what came up was her entry for the first Friday in Lent 1935. Very short and yet, my goodness, it could have been written yesterday:

Lent is teaching me a great deal through the lessons at hand—teaching me not to be surprised at the foolishness, even the treachery of creatures. [This lesson] really has nothing to do with them—…it is for my good.

Is there anywhere in our public square that’s not rife with this kind of foolishness? Does it rile you up as it does me? I would love, instead, to learn what Dorothy learned: to take it all in stride, not excusing the treachery but approaching it with a clear mind.
​
For those of you who practice Lent, may you have a blessed one. 

Two months ago I got hit with a torrent of inner conflicts/issues/etc., what I will refer to as dreck. The dreck included huge lifetime struggles with body image, my intense craving for approval, and my occasional impatience with  chronic illness.

​It was intense.

I know that deep spiritual practice tends to stir things up. But along with the dreck came an attitude I didn’t even know I had: I should be done with this by now.

I should be, right? I’ve done therapy off and  on for 40 years. I’ve kept a journal off and on for 40 years. Plenty of time to steam-shovel the big stuff, so that all I have to do now is fine tune.

No. As God/Reality/the Universe was trying to tell me, it doesn’t work that way.

People I respect confirmed this message. My Zen teacher compared self-transformation to “peeling the infinite layers of an onion.” My spiritual director told me about an interview with Carl Jung in which he said the conscious mind never stops processing, even in the face of death.

The clincher, for me, was a famous line from Dogen, the monk who brought Zen to Japan: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.” (Full text of the quote here.) Since studying the Buddha Way can take forever, why wouldn’t studying the self?

Sigh.

So, no: I guess we’re never done with the inner dreck. Conflicts we’ve long suppressed finally come to the surface. Issues we’ve dealt with for years demand another go. Spiritual practice keeps stirring the pot.

But why bother? On one level I want to say we’re asked to do it. On another, though, we mine such rich veins of life in the process. Sometimes we find deep healing, as I’m now finding—maybe for the first time since I was eight—with body image. Sometimes we glimpse a clear, liberating view of reality, and it takes our breath away, and that clarity and liberation are worth the whole long hard slog.

This aspect of life isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure. But if it calls to you, pay attention. You’re in for one hell of a ride.

Questions? Comments? Bring ‘em. 

The 2024 U.S. presidential election has become more personal to me—more personally threatening—than any other in my lifetime.

It took 60-some years for me to experience such a threat, thanks to a boatload of advantages I haven’t really earned: I’m white, college-educated, often mistaken for cis male. As a result, I’ve had the liberty to make voting decisions on “objective,” “rational” criteria, which here means criteria removed from my own experience. I read about the candidates, weigh their positions, get a sense of how they think, choose one. It’s not a bad approach per se. But I employ it at a certain distance.

Now comes 2024, and one aspect of my life—my status as a nonbinary person—is under attack.

Recently The Atlantic, AP news, and other sources have reported on Donald Trump’s rhetoric and plans for trans people.*** Because some of my friends may dismiss these sources as “liberal media,” I web-searched to see if I could find the same plans coming from Trump’s own lips. I did. Here’s what I found in two videos featuring Trump himself:

• He plans to call on Congress “to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”  (This pledge begins at 00:15 into the video.)
• He has pledged to direct “every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age” (begins at 00:26 into the video).
• He has said that transgender was never heard of “in all of human history” until “the radical left invented it just a few years ago” (untrue), and he pledged that “under my leadership, this madness will end” (begins at 00:55 into the video).

So if Donald Trump wins back the presidency, my own government may well cease to recognize me, or at least an essential truth about me. Being trans or nonbinary will suddenly become “less than,” or “less tolerated.” It’s easier to openly take negative stances against people in such circumstances. That can have consequences: as we’ve seen, some of Trump’s followers take his words and actions as license to commit violence against those not in his favor.

Granted, the risk to me is probably not high. But my trans friends and relatives may be more in harm’s way—whether the threat is to their personal safety or their access to needed services like healthcare and housing. So the 2024 election could reshape my own life and those of people I love.

It took this wakeup call to get me thinking of people and groups for whom every election is personal—and personally threatening. How they’ve lived with such a threat all these years, I have no idea.

What about the rest of you? What’s your experience of taking elections personally?
 

***Footnote: The line between trans and nonbinary is fuzzier than it used to be, which is why I feel justified in taking this personally. I seriously doubt Trump knows the difference.

Late last year, in a town about 90 minutes from us, a house exploded--really exploded. People felt it 40 miles away. Investigators found that an accidental gas leak caused the explosion.

​My first thought when I heard the news? Meth lab.

I know precious little about that town, let alone the house or its residents. There are millions more U.S. homes fueled with natural gas than there are drug labs (yes, I checked). So what the hell was I thinking?

I was thinking the way many folks think these days: assume the worst.

Consider the beliefs and stereotypes you hear from people assuming the worst. Doctors who order tests are just padding their bills. People who favor controls on immigration are racists. Businesses care about nothing but the bottom line. Scientists skew their research conclusions to please their grantors.

It’s true that, for each of the above statements, there are a few scoundrels. But too many people believe that everyone’s a scoundrel in a given category. Look how many human institutions (government, science, and the military, to name three) are no longer viewed with trust by large swaths of the populace.

There are problems with assuming the worst. For one thing, it’s flat-out inaccurate. I’ve met scientists who conduct research with the highest integrity, CEOs who care deeply about global concerns, doctors who are not padding their bills but using new and better tests to deliver better care. For another thing, when I assume bad intent, I can’t view the person I’m talking with as a unique being, with a unique perspective. I’ll learn little or nothing from the conversation.

In contrast, when I assume good intent, my heart opens. I’m suddenly attentive to whatever this person has to say. I may hear something that counters my hidden stereotypes or at least adds nuance to my thinking. Best of all, I’m open to a new or deeper bond.

Assuming good intent can also help us process the news. Yes, reporters and their employers have biases, and those biases may color their reporting. But what if we started by assuming that the reporter is trying to present the facts as they’ve uncovered them in their investigation? There’s time to factor in bias later, as we reflect on what’s before us.

Two other things about assuming good intent:

1. It’s not easy—especially not in today’s cynical public square. Cultivating it, from my perspective, requires both practice on our part and help from whoever/whatever lives in the depths of our hearts (God, Spirit, the Universe, whatever name you use).
2. Skepticism has its uses. If you’re facing someone who’s wounded you, or a news outlet you know well, your experience can help you filter what you’re hearing in a healthy, boundary-protecting way. But if this is your first go-round with someone/something, you have to start somewhere, and good intent is a happier place if nothing else.

What about you? Like me, you’ve probably done your share of both, good and bad intent. What is each one like for you? 

Yesterday, New Year’s Day, around 7:00 a.m., I gazed out the high window in our family room (as usual) and found a clear sky (not usual). It promised pink and blue later in the day but wasn’t there yet. I’d spent the week beforehand in an intensive at-home retreat, and I hadn’t noticed the unremitting gray skies that are more typical of our region. Still, the early morning clarity was a delightful surprise.

I’d like to cherish clarity and beauty, and wisdom, and delightful surprises as they come this year—and if they’re blogworthy, I’ll share them. They’ll likely mix with more difficult posts, because 2024 looks to be a difficult year for so many of us. Some topics will tread on sensitive ground, and I will do my best to handle with care. Some posts may seem political, but politics will (in most cases) not be the point; rather, I’ll use the political landscape to address a larger, more universal question.
​
As I said a while back, I have no clue how often I’ll post here. One thing I do know: I’d love to have you join me on this journey. One person’s thoughts can only go so far. Many people’s thoughts can do much more. And if we get to enjoy some clarity and beauty along the way, so much the better.

For the past couple of months, my brain has been working on two posts for this space. Now I may never post either of them, and I’m not entirely sure why.

​One involves the 2024 election—how it’s the first election in which I have a deeply personal stake in who wins. The other concerns the Israel-Gaza war. Even though I’ve mulled both of these at length, I cannot shake a sickish feeling deep within my chest, the sense that these are not yours to post.

Israel-Gaza has inspired thoughts in me from the beginning, many of which I haven’t seen articulated in mainstream or social media. So there might be value in saying (posting) them out loud. But they have a certain reserve from the raw events on the ground, as though they come from my head and not my heart. They feel like what I’ve called “the arrogance of the abstract.”

The election post has run into its own quagmire. Here I am, having voted since 1976, and it takes till 2024 for me to have a deeply personal stake? This makes my observations feel like small potatoes compared with those whose lives could be upended by every election, especially people on the margins. My post feels too me-centered right now, too removed from the larger landscape.

Neither post, at this point, would do what I believe this blog (and my whole vocation) want to do: to spur myself and others to explore certain aspects of life as honestly and openheartedly as we can, within ourselves and with one another.  

It may seem like overthinking to ponder this question in today’s “post everything” social media landscape. On the contrary, it’s precisely today’s social media landscape that makes this kind of pondering useful.* So…how do you decide when to speak, or post, and when to keep your thoughts to yourself?
 
 
*Here I’m alluding to the suggestion (original source and wording unknown) to ask yourself three questions before saying anything: Is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Do you use this formula? How has it worked for you?