Good morning friends.
I have no time on Sundays to write here, but my thoughts are always on fire on Sunday mornings, so I often end up writing a bit anyway.
First, I do want to remind everyone that this writing will always be free. There will be no paywalls, never a time when I stop you mid-read and tell you that the rest is not accessible without your money.
It’s not because I’m super sainty or even that I have so much money that I don’t need more. I have always felt that my writing and photography should be available to all. I can’t fight it within myself.
The last time I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City I noticed something that made my blood boil: all of the people milling around in there on a Tuesday afternoon were white or white-ish and all of the people who were guarding the (sometimes monstrously hideous) art were dark-skinned.
I imagined them huddling in the locker room at the end of the day talking about all of the white people paying lots of money to look at something their grandchild could make. But I also could taste the flavor of inequity in my mouth and it was vile.
Art, especially in museums, should be available to all. Everyone should have a chance to read and see and experience things that might inspire the creation of art in them.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
However! Those of you who do choose to pay for a subscription: THANK YOU!! I do have to pay the guy who plows the driveway and for the heating fuel and my student loans and car loan and my kids live in other places and I only always ever just want to go and see them, so thank you for supporting my life. I appreciate that very much. I see it as kind of a tip jar and I’ve been thinking of putting one out in church on Sunday morning.
Kidding.
But also not kidding. Kids are getting tips these days for standing at a counter taking a hamburger order, so why not? Tips are a way of saying thank you, right? I’m for them. They’re optional and meaningful, too.
I also wanted to mention two other things and then I have to finish my ‘sermon.’
First, I read this piece in the NY Times today about an atheist chaplain and an inmate on death row in Oklahoma. Frankly I had never heard of the idea of a chaplain with no faith at all, and if you don’t have a subscription to the NYT you won’t be able to read it, I’m sorry.
Basically apparently every inmate on death row is, by Federal mandate, allowed to have a spiritual care person with them at the time of their death, so these two men started a conversation that grew into a friendship and the chaplain left his life in Brooklyn to accompany this man to his death.
Both of them talk about their upbringing and what they were subject to in the name of religion and how they turned away from that. They talked about their sense of the afterlife (basically nothing) and they talked about people, the condition of being human. It sounds like their conversations were deep and meaningful and that in the end they formed a meaningful friendship, a bond of mutual respect and love. Which is really awesome.
I found myself thinking one thing when I was done reading: no one gets it right. Not one faith tradition, no religion. These are all human constructs based on the biases of their founders and they’re all wrong in one way or another, usually in about a thousand ways. Most particularly in their belief that they’re right.
And no human gets it right, either. Because we are all just best-guessing and everything we think is true or right has to move through the many filters of our lives: childhood, school, church, sports, friends, parents. We might be born knowing, but that sacred truth is washed out of us pretty quickly by all the screwed-up people we interact with in our lives.
We all spend our lives constructing a set of beliefs based on our own unique experience of being in this world. Why we feel we have to press those up against anyone else is a mystery to me. My beliefs don’t become right when I prove that yours are wrong. Which, as we know, is impossible, so why even bother? No one ever really changes anyone else’s mind after a certain age.
Tragedy will make us re-think some things. Adversity, challenge, trauma, the loss of someone or something dear to us. Pain seems to soften us enough so that we stop thinking that everything we know and believe is true.
That’s the beauty of suffering. It is a beautiful, beautiful opportunity when dark days come to call because when you make it through there is a good chance you will be a better person, more compassionate, more curious, less correct.
And two: life is not nearly as much about being right as it about being in it. Being engaged, learning, doing, asking, trying, failing. Laughing at yourself as you go, because you don’t really know what the heck is going on, but you want to be in it, you want to be a solid participant in your life, engaged with the people in your tribe, helpful to those who need help. You want to show up.
You do not want to live your life with the hundred yard stare of a person waiting for the bus. You want to be in it, in the muck, engaged, willing to be wrong and to look foolish. You want life to do its work on you so that when it’s time for you to leave here you will go having really lived. Who cares what your theory or your beliefs are? They’re yours and no one else needs to know, unless they ask.
Wrestling with the Big Questions is a terrific idea, just don’t think for a minute that you’ll know the answers or that you have the answers. Life is a gigantic question mark from one end to the other and your job is to seek, search, ponder, wonder, wrestle. Stay open, always, until your last breath. It’s all an enormous magical, mystical, ever-changing crazy gorgeous mystery.
Amen!
At the Embury senior Apartments, in the Wesley Community, in Saratoga Springs, NY, there is an art group that meets weekly. A black resident and artist is part of the group and does post her lovely art on the art wall. We need to see more black artists and their work.
Just in case you missed the last one:
“🥰🥰😘😘✌🏽grandiose hugs!”