Bon Appetit

I really enjoyed Jim Haynes' essay for NPR's series "This I Believe," Inviting the World To Dinner. He discusses his love of introducing people to people and his belief that we can love each other even if we do not understand each other.

Two kinds of belief

I recently indulged myself with a series of comments on my friend Serenity's post about church-going and communion. Oddly enough, I found this quote that seems pertinent to those comments in the front of a paperback mystery I am reading. There are several Jim Corbett's, including a famous hunter and a famous prize-fighter, but I'm assuming that this Jim Corbett was the Quaker activist who was a co-founder of the Sanctuary movement.

There is a faith that is primarily belief. This kind of faith calls for definitive doctrines from which guiding objectives and priorities can be derived. And there is a faith that is primarily trust. This kind of faith expects to be guided by a unifying presence that enlivens each moment, breaks all borders, gathers us into communion with one another, and addresses us in all we meet. For faith as belief, it makes sense to ask how all we presently encounter can be used to achieve our (or God's) objecives; the present must be sacrificed to the future. For faith as trust, the future we hope for must emerge out of a fulfilled present; to treat any being or situation we meet only as a means to be used or as an obstacle to be eliminated attacks the historically unique liberating power with which every person and every community is endowed.

--Jim Corbett

Listening

Listening is one of the most powerful things we can do. It's also one of the hardest things to do, partly because its intimacy leads to responsibility and partly because it requires us to set aside what we have to say.

I see the power and the difficulty of listening at work all the time. People on two sides of some issue lock horns, hearing only what they say themselves. Sometimes a third party can come along and find a way through the impasse just by listening to what both sides are really saying.

I'm slowly learning to do this with my kids too, to listen not just to their words or their attitudes but to the hurt or fear or concern (however silly it seems to an adult) behind them. It's difficult because I have to think of them rather than myself, to set aside my own hurt at what they have said to me in order to listen to their heart, and to believe that what they have to say is at least as important as what I have to say. It is, of course, powerful for those same reasons.

This understanding of the power of listening is behind the StoryCorps project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to listening to, and recording, what everyday people all over the country have to say. These stories can be heard on public radio, read in a book called Listening Is an Act of Love, and will be archived in the Library of Congress. StoryCorps has declared November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, the National Day of Listening, an opportunity for us all to take time to listen to the people around us, to remind them, and ourselves, that everyone matters enough to be heard and remembered.

So, if you can tear yourself away from the after-Thanksgiving sales for a little while (who has money to spend anyway, right?), take some time to listen to someone, whether a grandparent, a child, a neighbor, or the person taking your order at a restaurant. Who knows? When you give the gift of listening, you just might walk away with an unexpected gift yourself.

Some good news for once

Sometimes listening to the news can be quite depressing (OK, most of the time listening to the news can be quite depressing), so an occasional bit of good news is always welcome. I read this morning about a recent survey that found an undiscovered population of western lowland gorillas in the Congo which meant a dramatic increase in the total estimated numbers remaining. How often do you get to hear that?

I know some people won't understand why this report makes me happy given all the awful things happening in that part of the world (gorillas are just animals, aren't they?), but I felt a tremendous lift of my spirits. There is still great danger of extinction for most primates across the world, but one has a little better chance than we thought. It is a triumph of life in a world where we humans tend to forget (or ignore) how interconnected all of life is.

Spin

Today I ran across a blog entry entitled The Sustaining Narrative on a blog I had never read before, Crunchy Con. Here is an excerpt:

I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

What the author is getting at is the way we construct narratives around social or political issues to help cover the tragedy that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm us, the way we sometimes become good at lying to ourselves about (or at least distracting ourselves from) uncomfortable truths. Of course, politicians have long made use of "spin doctors" to make the truth seem better than it really is, but this sort of thing is not limited to politicians.

I remember the funeral of a friend I had in college, a young woman who had been married for only a year when she was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, the preacher went on and on about how my friend had died for a reason, standing up for what was right, a martyr of sorts for the Christian faith, an example to all the sinners in the room who had better take notice of her sacrifice for their sakes. I'm guessing the preacher didn't know how, when all her fellow Holiness church members were away, my friend and her husband would put on their forbidden wedding rings, turn on a little forbidden music, and dance the night away together. If she had known, maybe the funeral sermon would have been about the danger of worldly pleasures that lead you to an early grave.

Either way, I resented the preacher's need to use my friend's death for her own ends, to bolster her appeal. My friend had not died for the audience's sake, and she hadn't died for her sins. She had just died--a wonderful, vivacious, happy life snuffed out. Maybe there was a bigger reason, but it just seemed arrogant to me for that preacher to pretend she knew what it was in order to get a response from her listeners.

Looking back, farther away from the grief of that moment, I wonder if that preacher might have been overwhelmed with grief herself--she might have been related to my friend for all I know. Maybe like that mother who lost her son in Iraq, she felt like she had to attach a deeper purpose to her tragedy so she could stand the pain, weaving a concealing narrative around the hurt to distance herself from it. I think we all do this, with our meaningless platitudes when someone loses a family member, with our sour grapes when we don't get our way, with our excuses when we fail.

And so I have to say, as my looking outward turns back inward, that, no, this isn't healthy, that it isn't helpful. Some things cannot be allowed to hide behind the protective coloration our invented narratives provide--self-pity, arrogance, hatred, prejudice, greed. If we hide these things, if we deny them to ourselves and others, we risk acting out their stories over and over again. But this propensity for spin that I find inside myself also serves to remind me of the humanity, the ache, the loss that is often behind it. It is all to easy too despise in others what lives comfortably in me, to see the lie but forget the pain that created it. This too is a kind of spin.

I am reminded of a verse from the Bible:

Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. --Psalm 85:10

I don't know exactly what this would look like, but it is what I think is needed: compassionate truth that is able to pierce the lies we tell ourselves and others without piercing the broken heart mourning within. Perhaps generosity to our own hearts and those of others is where we must start in order to strip away the tangled narrative threads we have wound around the truth. Only when we can look unflinchingly at the painful realities we so fear can we deal with those realities and turn from the stubborn pain that imprisons us in the failures of the past to find hope and redemption in the present.

Free Rice

Sometimes I just need a one minute break from what I am doing, to step away, unhook my brain, do something else, and relax. Being a word lover who cares a bit about what happens in the world, my current favorite one minute break is to go to freerice.com. The idea is that you try to match vocabulary words to the word that has the closest meaning in a list they give you. For each one you get correct, they donate twenty grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. The money comes from the advertising revenue generated by refreshing the site each time you win. Of course, twenty grains of rice isn't much. But then, yesterday, with everyone who participated, Freerice.com was able to donate 150,137,840 grains of rice. This is, by my calculation, in the neighborhood of 150,000 large servings. So play. Learn. Give.