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My Thoughts on Things - George Floyd

5/29/2020

In the wake of sad and challenging news, like learning about the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, the thing that helps me gain a sense of perspective is mindfulness.

I need a quiet place to connect with my sources of inspiration, and to ground myself in restorative powers: mostly nature, but sometimes writing. By mindfulness, I mean stopping to think and to feel and to actually connect with what is coming up inside of me. It is a chance for me to catch my breath and hopefully respond from a place of authenticity and heart.

Mindfulness like other contemplative practices still holds a degree of exoticism in our go-go, reflexive lifestyles as North Americans. Our first reaction is to react; to do something; to rail against injustice; to decry our nation's history of racism; to lambaste anyone with a differing view point than our own; and finally, to ride roughshod over the carcasses of our enemies (or simply the ignorant) fully convinced of our own, unique brand of righteousness.

But for me, it is terribly important that I stop and reflect, and feel my feelings, so that I might better know which feelings are my own and which ones are seeping in from the outside.

I choose mindfulness because I want to make sure that my feelings, especially my worries and concerns are in fact my own. I want to know that the anxiety that I might feel is not a stowaway, or some other unbidden guest from places outside of myself. It is all too easy to get stirred up by our surroundings. None of us are immune to herd mentality. That is not to say that a concern is only a concern if it is my own exclusively, or that it has to impact me directly in order to be valid. However, it is important that I take on what I can bear, and not too much more. It is important to know what is my own, and what is not. That being said, I would not be fully human if I could not empathize with the suffering of those around me, both known and unknown to me, and those very far away, in very different circumstances.

In the wake of the unfortunate, tragic and horrifically sensationalized death of Mr. George Floyd, on the streets of Minneapolis, at the hands of police officers; my heart goes all the way out to all who knew and loved him.

Words could never fully capture the depth of pain and loss they must all be feeling right now. I imagine that Mr. Floyd comes from a place that is probably well acquainted with heartbreak and despair, and I am saddened that his loved ones now have to take on one more burden, and a very public one, to their, already, unfair share of suffering. My heartbreaks knowing that whatever grieving process Mr. Floyd’s loved ones will have to undertake is now horribly complexified by the unrelenting national attention, the rioting in the streets, and the social distancing protocols of COVID-19. This situation sucks in every conceivable way.

Yet, it still feels too soon for me to offer any other real comment on what has taken place in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is a city I have enjoyed visiting in the past, a real jewel of place in the upper midwest. And, it is a place where I found the people to be exceedingly welcoming, friendly, with a vibrant global outlook. But, I don’t know the place in any real sense, and I have no real connection to the people involved. Based on the images and videos on social media and the 24 hour news cycle it appears that a man met his untimely death, in the latest example of either police incompetence or police maleficence. The whole thing seems grossly out of control from any vantage point.

Reading this dispassionate recounting from a black man, (me) about another black man, (the deceased Mr. Floyd) who was subject to police brutality, might come as a complete surprise to some. One might expect more anger, outrage, or more despair, but it is hard for me to summon those feelings right now. I am not numb. I don’t believe I have become desensitized to violence visited on black people. I feel sad, I feel compassion, I also feel calm. These are the feelings that come up for me. Others might feel differently, and that's ok.

My concern is that each person sits with their feelings whatever they are, and that they speak a truth that is theirs -- authentically. I don’t want to be manipulated in the social media frenzy that has erupted. The social media outrage does not feel quite like my own outrage, and I see no point in adding fuel to that fire.

Social media tends towards manipulation and to a large degree we are complicit in ceding control of our emotional lives to dark (opaque) forces and algorithms with many hidden agendas online. Hysteria, rage, outrage, terror, defensiveness, and helplessness are all as contagious as any virus we might wish to protect ourselves against. These feelings have a long history of use for nefarious political purposes, as propaganda for agitation. If we are made fearful and anxious all the time, those feelings will take us over. They will overwhelm our sense of self, and our sense of direction. Then those who wish to divide and control us will have an easier time doing so.

I want my feelings to be my own, and to not come in from the outside. And, to preserve that sense of personal agency, the best response for me right now is to feel my feelings of calm and also sadness, and to share those feelings with anyone who is interested in hearing about them.

To say that George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers is a horrific event is to overstate the obvious.

To say that George Floyd’s death at the hands of police reopens old wounds, or to say that his death has exposed all of the modern day fault lines at the intersection of race, class, access to education and employment opportunities, seems incredibly unoriginal.

There is a lot of that sort of chatter, grandstanding, and make believe outrage going on right now. All of it seems wasteful and unnecessary and exhausting to me. No one will be surprised to hear what all know to be true, that inequality is real, and that communities of color are at greater risk for violence of all kinds. Knowing this, we can stop sharing the videos and the news clips, and the opinion pieces (including this one) because we already know what it is.

At this point the suffering of people, especially black people, has taken on a voyeuristic, porngraphic quality, in the way it is being shared, gazed at, commented upon, by all people, and I’d rather see less of it, for my own well-being.

So, my reaction to all of this, at this time, is no reaction. What has happened has happened.

We all want to do something, we all want answers, and maybe solutions. But the answer right now might be to sit with the questions (these are not new questions either), but most of all, to mourn this tragically sensationalized loss. As I mindfully sit with what is coming up for me, in terms of my feelings, I encourage you to do the same.

If you want to do something, be mindful of what you share online. In your sharing ask yourself, as ancient and modern teachers have taught; is it true, is it kind, and is it necessary. That last part about it being necessary is the most important. So much of what we are seeing is noise, it is loud banging on the pots and pans for attention, and furthering the manipulation that seeks to drive the wedge that already exists in this country even deeper. We would all benefit from less noise, and more quiet and spaciousness to truly connect and feel our own true feelings. It might be time for a Social Media Sabbath.

And, for those who are wondering about me, I don’t need anything other than space to breath, reflect and mourn, as best I can with the loved ones of George Floyd.

I think you need to do the same thing too.

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Reconstituting the World

5/9/2020

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Reconstituting the World
A Sermon
By Rev. Daniel Gregoire

Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton

April 26, 2020

Reading:

II in 1988 in A Timbered Choir
By Wendell Berry

It is the destruction of the world
In our own lives that drives us
Half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
In trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
To be broken, our bodies
Existing before and after us
In clod and cloud, worm and tree,
That we, driving or drivn, despise
In our greed to live, our haste
To die. To have lost, wantonly,
The ancient forest, the vast grasslands
Is our madness, the presence
In our very bodies of our grief.

Excerpt from Natural Resources
By Adrienne Rich in The Dream of a Common Language

My heart is moved by all I cannot save
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those, who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.

Sermon:


Last Week we explored the nature of apocalypsis - the ancient Greek word that refers to revelation or unveiling.

We looked at what is being exposed in this moment of crisis, certain abuses of power and resources, inequities, inequalities and incompetencies in areas of leadership. We’ve also witnessed surprising shows of leadership from unexpected quarters.

We were encouraged to consider that one of the most important things being revealed, right now, is the importance of taking care of ourselves and each other.

We were encouraged to see this moment and other moments like it, as a necessary passage towards a renewed sense of vision. But not just that, this moment is ushering a new Heaven and new Earth. We are in the early days of a revolution of values. COIVD-19 is revealing so much.

The tensions and stretching of this moment are all a part of our unfolding, our becoming more fully human.

Today I want us to consider what aspects of our current experience do we want to carry with us into this courageous, new world we are entering?

Post apocalypse?

Post-COVID-19?

What are the tools and resources that could only be found here, that could only be summoned in this crisis that we might call upon in the future?

What have we learned now that will be of benefit to us, and our communities going forward?

It is important for us to understand that these times are not normal. There is no amount of routine, doublespeak or sheer makebelieve that can convince us otherwise. And, that is OK.

You are OK.

That sensation of dislocation, being untethered and unaccountable is actually the right response right now for all of us. Everyday I have this personal sense of being untethered, floating along in the mist and haze of this waking dream, or nightmare. Military analysts and theorists talk about the fog of war. This must be what it is like to be at war, and to have the war in our homeland.

We have always been fortunate as Americans to always be at war, but to rarely have war interfere with our daily routines. Since the second world war, we’ve been able to blithely go about our affairs, sans risk, sans supply shortages, sans disruptions in travel, while wars were being waged in our name. While our bombs leveled cities from Hanoi to Haiphong, Aleppo to Baghdad.

However, something different has occurred here. While we slept, an unseen enemy had landed on our shores, and marched into our towns and cities and into our homes. For the first time and very, very long time, we Americans can begin to appreciate the level of risk, and uncertainties, the stark realities associated with grocery shopping in a war torn nation.

Leaving our homes has taken on an unprecedented level of risk. A trip out could mean slow-going, through check-points, rations, violent confrontations, shell shocked people. Leaving our homes is dangerous in ways that most of us are not used to in the United States. However, some of the uncertainties that we now face, would be quite familiar to someone in Beirut, Lebanon; Kabul, Afghanistan or any of the occupied territories of Palestine and Gaza. There are many ways that a virus can be much like an improvised explosive device, a bomb, hidden in a marketplace, in a school, in a church in Cairo or Baghdad. Think about it.

Everything is more dangerous now: the handshakes, the intimate conversation, the exchange of money, the breaking of bread, the singing around campfire, even with social distance. All of this has caused me to grieve, the loss of my freedom, and most of all, the loss of my ability to engage the world using all of my senses.

If I am feeling untethered, weightless it is because our reality has become virtual. It is mediated through various screens (computers) and shields and masks and gloves, sanitizing wipes, and other barriers. All of these things are indispensable, yet they serve as painful reminders of the risks we are exposed to everyday. Everything is risky now.

Disruptions and dissociations, the overall disconnect between self and reality; these things are the qualities of war, especially when the war is at your doorstep.

I am not alone in saying that we are currently in a kind of war, in the age of COVID-19. Aisha Assad, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that:

Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened.

This war is a global war. There are many battle fronts in different countries, in different parts of town, in the hospitals and the halls of government.

Some might wonder just how we arrived at this moment of confrontation. What caused this crisis? I am not sure how relevant it is to speculate about these sorts of things. Instead of looking out, it is better to look within, here. The fact is the contagion is here, we know it, and we must do what we can to take care of each other.

At the same time, COVID-19 and the war we are waging to protect life, is causing our worlds to unravel, and we are seeing it in so many different ways.

What I most appreciate about our first reading by Wendell Berry, is how he articulates what we are witnessing, the unraveling of the known world, and he is able to name the strong emotions associated with its coming apart: the greed, experienced as hoarding; the haste: experienced as impatience, the madness, experienced as the clawing at the walls, some of us do, desperate for relief from our sense of loneliness and disempowerment.

And, most of all, he names the grief we are all experiencing. Grief is a special kind of sadness, it is always caused by the perception of lost, the lost of someone or something. It is a heaviness of the heart, mixed in with the pain of regret.

Berry also suggests that we are complicit in this apocalypsis. There is a sense that we brought this on ourselves by our participation in a corrupted system of beliefs that allow us to destroy the very thing that was given to us in trust, this delicate Earth.

Think about how our incessant comings and goings, our travel in the air, on the land and on the seas for recreation and vacation; our materialism, the buying of so much more than we need; all of this created the pathways that brought COVID-19 everywhere.

How much of our doing has contributed to our undoing, and how much of that is now shown to be unnecessary, wasteful, needlessly risky?

Being at war has a way of clarifying things. It necessarily lends itself to changing, and polarizing our perspective. It crystalizes what's important, essential, what's worth dying for. So, if we were to name and imagine what we are going through as warlike, how might that change things for us? Any veteran of war can attest to the fact that there is little room for second guesses, or second chances. War has always had a sharpening effect on the psyche, things become black and white, friend or foe. The grey areas are few and far between. There is common enemy and common cause in war. Another compelling quality of war that relates to what we are experiencing, is the exquisitely excruciating stillness between fighting, the lulls between the battles.

In a recent article in the New Yorker Magazine, the journalist Karen Russell calls that exquisite stillness, stasis, where she writes:

...our stasis …[is] Externally we are all separating from public spaces, cancelling weddings and graduation, retreating into our homes. This physical separation belies what is happening on another plane: people are responding to the crisis with a surprising unity. (page 36 The New Yorker, April 13, 2020)

Stasis can be painful, but it also lends itself to preparation --ours.

And, in a way, without fully realizing it, we’ve used this time to come into formation, we are already showing the kind of unity that will help us to win this fight. Russell goes on to note: “How rapidly we are adjusting our behavior, to protect each other.”

In our second reading we heard:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those, who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.

This is the concluding stanza from a poem titled Natural Resources, by Adrienne Rich. Rich was an American poet, essayist and Feminist of the second half of the 20th century. She chronicled her experience as an out lesbian through poetry and prose, as well as the challenging experiences of all women in a patriarchical, heteronormative society. I really appreciate her insights into a world, very different from my own.

So much has been destroyed, she writes, in the lives of many people, which could be said for our world now.

The economy, livelihoods, and the lives of families and communities impacted by COVID-19.

I can think of the loss of Gurcell Henry, a long time professional soloist at the Community Church of New York, she often sang when I was the guest minister. Gurcell sang at my ordination service. Her stirring musicality, expressed in body, as much as in sound, disclosed expansive new vistas in our ancient tradition. Singing hymns like they’ve never been sung before. She recently died of COVID-19 related complications.

This is the loss of a beautiful person, an incredible voice and presence from the music world, and Unitarian Universalism. A loss like this feels all too soon.

So much has been destroyed.

In so many ways it feels as though the web of life is unraveling, it is being torn apart in some places.

But here, I want us to look away, and see a more compelling image that we might hold onto.

Imagine a spider. Now, I know many people have a fear of spiders, but imagine a friendly spider, as most spiders are harmless to humans, imagine her spinning an orb web, of incredibly strong yet delicate strands. This spider and her web are glistening in the morning light.

Our spider goes to great effort to spin an entire world for herself in a hedge row, near a nighttime light source. We’ve seen her at work. She builds this web to supply her needs, and care for those closest to her, her kin, it is also beautiful, especially in the morning light and bedazzled in dew.

Now imagine a careless child bounding in the yard and knocks up against the web in the hedge, causing part of it to come undone. It’s all too bad. And so she builds anew, reconstructing the parts of the web that have been destroyed.

Imagine another time, this time, the gardener trimming the hedge, breaks strands of the web, again our spider returns and repairs. Perhaps if it becomes too hazardous, it will be necessary to move to another location, but in the new location our spider works with renewed effort to rebuild the web.

We are the spiders, we are the builders of the web. We are the ones who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary, power, reconstitute the world.

As Unitarian Universalists we see ourselves as builders of a new way, and getting stronger everyday.

So, lets lets come back to the work, lets remember our bearings, our principles, and what we have learned from this experience as we pick up the pieces where we can, remembering that the disruptions, dislocations and dissacitions of the moment are momentary.

Our tradition reminds us, with our 7th principle to Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Our 6th principle reminds us of the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

This sixth principle is still our goal even here, in the midsts of ruins, the unraveling wrought by a pervasive enemy we cannot see.

Even here as we sit in the rubble and ash of our personal and communal lamentations, and they are many.

Even here as we struggle to make sense of all the broken pieces, broken strands and shattered glass of our lives.

Even here, the goal remains the same, world community with peace,, liberty and justice for all.

And so we courageously (not perversely) come back to the web and find our work of reconstituting the world.

Amen. Blessed Be.

Let’s come back to the questions that got us started, these wartime questions. Please consider journaling or discussing your responses:

I want us to consider what aspects of current experience do we want to carry with us into this courageous new world we are entering? Post apocalypse, Post-COVID-19?

What are the tools and resources that could only be found here, that could only be summoned in this crisis that we might call upon in the future?

What have we learned now that will be of benefit to us, and our communities going forward?

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yield and overcome

My Thoughts on Things - George Floyd

Reconstituting the World

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