Attention

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don’t mean only these poems but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live

the life that goes on between them,

I think all the time about invisible work,

about the single mother on welfare I talked to

years ago, who said, “It’s hard.

You bring him to the park, run rings

around yourself keeping him safe,

cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner, and there’s no one

to say what a good job you’re doing, how you were

patient and loving for the ten

thousandth time, even though you had a headache.”

And I, who am used

to feeling sorry for myself because I am lonely

when all the while, as the Chippewa

poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

think of the invisible work that stitches up the world

day and night, the slow, unglamorous

work of healing, the way worms in the garden

tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe and bees

enter and leave their lovers like exhausted Don Juans while owls

and poets stalk shadows, our

loneliest labors under the moon. There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us long

after we have stopped

listening. I stop and let myself lean

a moment against the blue

shoulder of the air. The work

of my heart

is the work of the world’s

heart. There is no other art.        ...Alison Luterman

To ask what MATTERS is to ask what is of utmost importance to a being. If someone can’t tell you, you can find out, they say, by looking at their checkbook or their calendar. I imagine today it would be their Smart phone.

I would answer the question this way:

I would say both nothing matters AND everything matters.

The word matter is ancient and multi-layered.

Besides substance it also means potential.

It comes from the root as MATRIX and MOTHER

And matrix means, among other things, WOMB.

There is no sense in which we can divorce our theological and philosophical understanding of life and death from the matrix into which we were born. Even if we were to divorce ourselves from that matrix, we would still have a theology based upon rejection, which is still a belief system. Everyone believes in something, or as Dylan sang, you have to serve somebody.

So: matter.

For me, when I am practicing contemplation and mindfulness, what does NOT matter is winning the lottery, what kind of car someone drives, titles and honorifics.

What matters is the tear on the cheek of one child, the fate of even one child going hungry or separated from their mother, or getting killed in a school shooting or a bomb blast, being abused or neglected, be it in Syria, at the Mexico border, or here in Tennessee. The well-being of creatures, the worms in the garden, the bees and the owls, one moment of connection, one second of peace. Love matters. Truth matters.

But that is when I am disciplined and diligent. Other times, I go on the web and buy a new sweater.

What matters to you?

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don’t mean only these poems but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live

the life that goes on between them,

I think all the time about invisible work,

Who does this invisible work?

Here’s an example from our own Unitarian heritage:

The day he was taken by the Nazis in Prague, Dr. Norbert Capek preached as usual to his congregation, using metaphor as many Unitarian ministers did in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. He preached as storm troopers stood in the back of his church.

We all know that this is the worst winter in our history and the ground is terribly frozen. We also know that Spring must come and the seeds now buried will sprout and bloom again.

Of course, the Nazis knew this was code, as it was not Winter but Spring, and the 72-year-old man was arrested and sent to Dachau where he was the victim of cruel medical experiments as well as the gas chamber. For practicing this faith, our faith of freedom and humanitarianism. He never gave up. Even in the camp, he led church services and continued to compose hymns for his fellow. Invisible work.

What we do, and refuse to do, matters. Our attention becomes intention. Our attention is what moves us from intention to action.

Bumper sticker: What you do matters. (Holocaust Museum)

What do you do?

And I, who am used

to feeling sorry for myself because I am lonely

when all the while, as the Chippewa

poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

think of the invisible work that stitches up the world

day and night, the slow, unglamorous

work of healing…

And, words matter.

Words. Like “though” and “intimidated”.

Words like “bad news” and “investigate”.

One word can cause deep wounds, another word can heal and repair.

The word “matter” matters.

Black Lives matter. This movement was brilliant in many ways. The opposite of black lives MATTER is not All Lives Matter. The opposite is Black Lives Don’t Matter. I will tell you that black lives didn’t matter to me for my first few decades of life. I neither lived near nor knew any person of color, other than our housekeeper, Emma, almost nothing was taught us in school even though it was at the height of the Civil Rights movement, nor did my family of origin affirm black lives in any way. I lived about two miles away from the AME church where the impetus for the Mt. Laurel decision was formed. Attention became intention which became ontological results. Nearby is Jacob's Chapel, a stop on the Underground RR as I suspect my family home may have been.

Click here for more on the Mt. Laurel Doctrine.

Jacob's Chapel AME Church. Genesis of Mt. Laurel Decision

The phrase and the movement Black Lives Matter pleads with us to see the myriad ways in which the institutions of this society, this matrix in which we exist, education, government, real estate, religion, law enforcement, justice, health and wellness, even entertainment and the arts, have neglected, trampled over, and treated as less than human persons of color. I find it hard to believe that any educated white person could review their life and not see this, not comprehend the privilege which they have been granted, the doors that were open to them and closed to others, the suspicions placed on others but not on them. We have been trained and have trained ourselves to neither review nor acknowledge these things. Again, only a discipline and a mindfulness will keep us alert to this 
pleading.

Cain Family Home 1940-2018

There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us long

after we have stopped

listening. I stop and let myself lean

a moment against the blue

shoulder of the air

What this small congregation does matters.  Our intention to love and heal comes through when intention becomes attention and the invisible work of housing, feeding and caring for the least among us. Our attention turns what matters into substances, food, mattresses, conversation, socks and toothbrushes.

Listening matters. Giving our full attention to the other.

How can you pay attention?

The work

of my heart

is the work of the world’s heart

There is no other art.

What is the work of your heart? Will you stop long enough to hear it?

Thanks

Thanks

W. S. Merwin - 1927-2019

• 
• 
  

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

The "Cheers" Effect" When Small is Better

Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving…

Where do we “belong”? To Whom? And what comes of knowing that?

I lost the one place I considered “home” this past year, and at about the same time, I watched a Netflix show called I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore. It was a dark comedy, sort of like my life, and near the end a gospel song plays:

This World is not my home,

I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

I found myself singing it for days in my head. The singer is anticipating Heaven and angels: The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door. And I fixed it up with Jesus a long, long time ago. The theology was a bit off, but the emotion so real.

The existential angst it expresses suits well this disorienting, disturbing time in our history. “Losing” home just underscored my sadness.

For me, the sale of our family home in rural Southern New Jersey was devastating. I should have expected it, but I was deeply distressed when it happened. It caused rifts in my family of origin that just exacerbated the ones that already exist. The house is an 18^th century farmhouse, and to me, it was still "my dad" even though Dad had been gone for over twenty years. His loves and passions were everywhere, from his shop (“man-shed”) connected to the freestanding garage, to the screened in porch where I sat during thunderstorms. Where I loved to sleep in summer. I still see him at the kitchen stove, making baked apples or stew or pop-overs and beaten biscuits. How would I go on without home?

Photos of the renovation!

My Buddhist studies had already taught me about impermanence. It’s the only thing we can count upon. I would have to change or let go of my notion of home.

Last spring I broke conventional rules and sent a letter to the new owners. I offered to share the dozens of old photos and slides taken during our family’s 75 year stewardship of it. Cris, the new owner, emailed me enthusiastically, and in July, I visited them. In 6 short months they had completely redone the house and yard. I was astonished, and disoriented! My dad’s shop was transformed in a she-shed, with a screened porch added to it. The living room where we’d sat in the same chairs, staring at the same painting, being lectured or scolded, was now a combination kitchen-family room. The old kitchen was a laundry/office, and the former dining room, where nothing had been moved for decades, was a TV room/parlor.

Seeing such an alteration in something I had counted on for sixty years was a revolution in my heart and mind. It was a conversion. My overall feeling was joy; I still felt grief, but I understood that a complete upheaval was what had made it possible for this old place to survive and thrive. Had I not been a student of Appreciative Inquiry, and Buddhist teachings, I may have responded very differently. The feeling of disorientation expressed in “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore” can be a lament, or an invitation to an entirely new way of seeing and being.

Where Do We Belong? NATURE is one answer.

SLIDE SHOW of FRACTALS CLICK HERE!

Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic. As he proved, fractal patterns were often found in nature’s roughness—in clouds, coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering of galaxies.

“Pollock painted nature’s fractals 25 years ahead of their scientific discovery!” He published the finding in the journal Nature in 1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics

As it turns out, chaos is one necessary stage in the activities of the Universe, and consequently in our organizations and in our own selves. What we once called depression or the “dark night of the Soul,” besides being problematic for equating darkness with negativity, can be what opens one human or one organization to order, beauty, and growth.

This is why nature is soothing and why people need more nature and less Euclidean structures. It is why we feel connected, why we feel we “belong,” why we feel at home in Nature. We are.

“It is ironic that in the midst of this proliferation of specialty islands, we live surrounded by communities that know how to connect to others through their diversity, communities that succeed in creating sustainable relationships over long periods of time. These communities are the webs of relationships called ecosystems."

 All of our attempts to organize ourselves out of chaos are ultimately fruitless. But embracing the chaos that necessarily emerges when humans come together is a key to a new way of understanding order.

Margaret Wheatley tells us that humans act out of two paradoxical needs: the need to belong and the need for self-expression. Too often, we sacrifice one for another. It can result in stifling conformity or isolation.

The price that communities pay for this conformity is exhausting and, for its members, it is literally deadly. Life requires the honoring of its two great needs, not one. In seeking to be a community member, we cannot truly abandon our need for self-expression

Particularly in the West, and in response to this too-demanding price of belonging, we move toward isolationism in order to defend our individual freedom. We choose a life lived alone in order for it to be our life. We give up the meaningful life that can only be discovered in relationship with others for a meaningless life that at least we think is ours. An African proverb says "Alone, I have seen many marvelous things, none of which are true."

(For much more on & by Wheatley, click here.

The core of AI is that systems are self-organizing. We can observe this in Nature, and in places where human nature is allowed to flourish. Think of the way humans responded after Katrina, Sandy, Paradise. Self-organization trumped official efforts which compounded the tragedies. Our religious organizations should be examples of this.

The reasons they are not is that they try to hard to impose order. They become cesspools of conformity and/or conflict at worst and at best, islands of specialization, rather than islands of sanity.

One of the biggest tragedies of organizations is that, in their efforts to “grow, be successful, be relevant” they fail to see that they are not welcoming to those who may join us or whom we may help.

Come, Come whoever you are.

The beauty of this “new” science and new way of understanding organizations is that once we begin to accept our own belonging in the scheme of things and stop trying to organize our way out of chaos, we begin to see the “other” as equally a part of the universe, as equally belonging (or maybe even more at home) as we.

We become open to the “other.” Immigrants, persons of color, trans and gender non-conforming persons, old people, mentally “ill” people, even Conservatives.

We see the world and our relationships in an I/thou lens rather than an I/it. (Buber)

What can we do now? What ought we do?

Love yourself.

Love others.

Love the world.

This is the question of sustainability.

Now, I hope you will leap with me from science and fractals to the questions of small farms, small places, and small churches. The key word is sustainability. If the past century has proven anything, it is that bigger is not better. In fact it is the proliferation of bigness that has created a society that can neglect, delude and profit from the destruction of the planet.

Wendell Berry has always made this argument; it has fallen mostly on closed ears as regards the people of power, influence, and money. But it has planted seeds in places and people everywhere.

The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by “sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection.

(from the Jefferson Lecture, 2012)

When Berry writes “affection,” he means not only emotion but its effects: small places, families, businesses, stories, music, human relationships that are genuine. All of those are actions you can still do. Each of those is a form of resistance.

I’ve been to his Baptist church in rural Henry County. He also means small churches.

Small churches matter for the same reason small farms, local food, and small communities matter. 

My internship advisor spoke at my Ordination almost 25 years ago. He had composed a sermon titled, The Dream of the Lost Sermon. Interestingly, on his way from Rockville to the small church in VA that ordained me, he had a flat tire and rushed in moments before he was to preach. The dream pretty nearly became a reality, his sermon illustration all too real! But the sermon was a beautiful expression of how we can trust in ministry that we will have the right thing to say, know what to do. Later he told me how much he enjoyed his time there: “I was wrong in my thinking about small congregations. They aren’t small people; they’re just small churches.”

UU Church of the Shenandoah Valley, 1993

My brother Jeffrey, cousins Kurt and Taryn, me, twin Sister Suzanne & a neighbor c. 1958 in our living room

Berry writes:

No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is economically or technologically possible, who look upon the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit. Against that limitlessness, in which we foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient effort to define ourselves as human and humane. 

Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.

But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.

I belong to KY, to my farm Innisfree, Nashville for this time, to the world of birds and trees and water, to people, my family, my children, and now to you. I belong to the forces that have shaped this old world, mystery and wonder and curiosity. Where do you belong? To whom? And what will you do once you realize that is your life?

House around 1900.

House late 1800s