Ponderings

Tomorrow my baby graduates from high school and I am struck by two seemingly disparate truths. Its been a long time coming and it happened so quickly. Time is funny that way, at moments the seconds last for hours but most often we get from here to there without pausing to absorb the wonder of the journey.

As is often customary, we will fill the weekend with festivities made more complicated with blended family dynamics. I would be tempted to remember the simpler days of yore when my brothers and I graduated from high school in southern Michigan. But if I’m remembering too carefully, I also remember the strange bits of family dynamics even time doesn’t completely dust away. (When my grandfather, late in life, married Jimmy Hoffa’s sister, family gatherings got interesting!)

Across generations and cultures, there seems to be universality to the sweet nostalgia of high school graduation. Perhaps because it is at once a place of completion and also of new beginning. Culturally assigned to classrooms, our youth now have some latitude to choose between continued education or work or (most likely) some combination of both. For parents it’s a time to take a deep breath and give thanks for all the winding roads that have brought us to this place. To be sure there will be more bends ahead, but this day is good… very good.

Yet as I type this, I am aware in new ways that this place in which I stand, as a mother with a soon-to-be graduate, is one of privilege. Trayvon Martin’s mother will not have this privilege. Too many mothers lose too many sons too early. And too I am mindful that the educational helping hands my son received are tragically not universal, the passes that he was given for youthful lapses in judgment are not given to all children equally, and that the freedom to be in school by day and extracurricular activities by evening is indeed rare.

As I stand at the threshold of this special weekend, I am mindful that this is what all families deserve and what every mother wants. Humbly aware of my privilege in this moment, the celebration is all the more sweet and my resolve to work for justice more secure.

More fully aware of the privilege, the drive for the perfect weekend dissipates. This isn’t a time to pretend to be the Brady Bunch, we are not. It’s not a weekend to compare our kids or our families to some mythic Norman Rockwell picture (circa Thanksgiving 1943) but rather to embrace the breath that is ours in the moment.

Getting ready for the open house, I look at the collection of school pictures and laugh out loud with poignant memories, giving thanks for the gift of hair that grows long enough for a preteen to hide and is then cut short when the teen comes into his own.

And as we prepare to schlep stuff back and forth between my house and his father’s, I give thanks for the bounty of the blended family’s two homes that not only give teens cover when in trouble with one parent but also give parents space from the angst of their teens as they push through the birth canal of adulthood.

Most especially, today I give thanks for an occasion to gather my family in one place to hold hands and stick together before our baby bird flies off to sleep away college.

And, like every mother everywhere, I pray, “dear God, keep them safe”.

Maurice Sendak captured the complicated human psyche in his iconic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are. I loved reading the book to my children and was mesmerized by the message as it came alive on the big screen a couple of years ago. Marketed to children, the ageless story speaks about a timeless search for connectedness and meaning.

The angst portrayed in the story is one that Sendak apparently knew all too well. In an interview with the New York Times in 2008, he explained that, “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.” (NYTimes) Meanwhile, Sendak had a 50 year relationship (denied marriage of course) with his beloved, Eugene Glynn. But not once in all of those of years could he share the fullness of his family of choice with his family of origin. He understood in ways all too real the nature of the self that must roar far from home.

As I sit with the sad bit of truth I wonder if it is inevitable or a tragic missed opportunity or perhaps both. To be sure the instinct to hide the wild thing within is archetypal. My deepest fear is that if I am fully known, I will not be loved or loveable. It is a core belief that I try daily to unlearn and move on a circuitous path that is almost as many backwards steps as forward. As I listen to friends, I hear similar themes.

We spend our lives hiding parts of ourselves. Sometimes we hide in plain sight, sometimes under layers of decoys. We eat, drink, shop, gamble, and sex our way into intricate webs of self deceit that allow us to live half lives that we assume are full. Mary Oliver famously penned the promise in Wild Geese,

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

And in biblical language, the prophet Micah asks “What does the Lord require?” Not our weeping and wailing, not our self loathing or sacrificing, but simply this: “Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.” Yet believing that we are somehow unworthy, we make the simple things so very complicated.

Given the universal nature of our vulnerability and shame, Brene Brown should not have been surprised when her TED talk put her on the fast track to notoriety. (Brown@TED) Precisely because the experience is universal, the researcher who talks about the call to an authentic life, daring us to bring the wild rumpus of vulnerability and shame into the full light of day, found a welcome reception. When she took the stage and named vulnerability, breakdown and self in the same sentence, her life took an audacious turn. “I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure — like Ninja Barbie, but I’m Vulnerability TED.” But her authentic story telling captured the hearts of millions and her message is priceless: “You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

In the iconic story of the Wild Things, Sendak posits the theory that when we find comfort with the wild things within and beyond us, we are able to come back to the table. As I consider the parts of self that we prefer to leave outside with the other wild things, I find myself wondering if the table can expand to include even the rumpus. As I listen to Brown reinterpret the ancient call to authenticity, I begin to think it’s possible. In the meantime, I’m glad for Sendak’s invitation to play with all of our messiness in the limitless land of our imaginations.

The only thing worse than the way we treat vulnerable children is the way we obfuscate the truth. Too often the truth lies in the rubble beneath the wedge where children invariably pay the highest price. Nowhere is this more true than in the politics of public education in the St. Louis metro area.

This week there was much handwringing on one side of the aisle and jubilation on the other following Judge Vincent’s ruling. The only thing worse than the judge’s ruling is the case itself. Some (affluent) children in the (unaccredited) St. Louis Public Schools district were paying tuition at a nearby county district (Clayton); they sued Clayton to send their tuition bill to SLPS and lost. At issue was a state law that requires “failing” (unaccredited) districts to pay the tuition for students to attend “successful” neighboring districts. All of which might sound neighborly except that the suit was not about the right to attend but rather about who picks up the tab.

For a host of historic and complicated reasons, St. Louis Public Schools simply does not have money to pay Clayton tuition. My mother told me that you can’t get blood from a turnip. What she didn’t tell me is that in our blindness we keep trying until the turnip is mush. The only thing that would be accomplished by forcing SLPS to attempt to pay the tab at county schools would be to bankrupt the district. Is that the unspoken agenda? If so, speak it.

And if so, speak to how we are intending to care for the hundreds of thousands of children who would be left with no free public education, with or without accreditation. The politics of the Turner case turn my stomach, not because I am for or against city kids going to Clayton schools. My personal preference would be to open the “borders” and fund education on a state rather than local level. But long before we get to the issue of how we best fund education, we need to return to a fundamental question which, answered more than a century ago, has come up for renewal: Do we, or do we not, value free accessible public education for all of our children? At some point our children deserve our honesty about this. Now is that time.

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves. (Adams 1856)

Charters, private schools, magnets, transfers are definitionally value neutral and a case can be made that they enhance the education of all children. I am not moved to speak for or against any of them. Built on centuries of racism and classism, the mess we’ve created with our funding for public education isn’t going to be solved with any one fix. At the end of the day, what I want to know is that we, the taxpayers of both the city and county, are committed to funding free and accessible public education for all of the children in our community. The test of our commitment, for me, is how our system treats the child most vulnerable. In my religious tradition, we have a saying: “what we do to the least of these, we do to Jesus.” And our most vulnerable children, in the city and the county, continue to fly under the radar and far from the funding streams.

A popular Jesus teaching is that we ought shine our lights brightly, a less popular corollary he also shared was that what we do in secret will be brought to light. And light is shining in the St. Louis metro area. When the taxpayers joined in opposition to the suit, using the Hancock Amendment to cry foul, it allowed Judge Vincent to name the injustice of the unfunded mandate. Although we can celebrate that the ruling circumvents debtors prison for SLPS, our shared commitment to the children in our region has yet to be affirmed. In the glare of the morning light, our commitment is called into question and the lives of children hang in the balance.

Now it is up to all of us to deliver for the children. A child doesn’t choose the zip code of their birth nor does their zip code determine their inherent worth. Vilifying particular schools helps no one and only furthers the divide. Truth be told, there are fabulous teachers and schools and children in every zip code, and less than average ones too. Carefully listening to those whose experiences differ from ours, rolling up our sleeves in service, opening our pocket books – these are basic tools that will help. Our faith demands that every one of our schools be properly funded, supported, respected and encouraged so that every one our children, God’s children, can have a safe, healthy, and moral start in life.

Unless, of course, this is not our value. If it’s not, let’s have the decency to be honest about it. We can all agree that our children deserve at least that much.

In recent weeks my Facebook friends and I have been noticing and commenting on the ads that sit on our pages. Like most “free” sites, Facebook is adorned with a plethora of mathematically selected ads that in some way are supposed to mirror our habits and preferences.

One ad that too many of us have seen in recent weeks is about gout. Gout is not a topic that women my age would prefer to have flouted on our home pages, but several of us, nonetheless, have been stalked by a well-intended study. On my own, I’m not sure that I would admit to having this one grace my site, but since several comrades have bravely named the menace, I will begrudgingly admit to having seen been visited by this one too.

Another ad that got under my skin and prompted my (unproductive) commentary was for church management software. I confess that the specificity of the ad caught my attention, clearly they know something about me if they’re marketing church management (database, et al) software to me! Don’t even get me started on the bane of every minister’s existence, the database. Every single program promises the moon and even the Cadillac versions rarely reach cruising altitude. On a whim, I went to the site and discovered an excellent product. Really. The best I’ve seen, and I’ve looked at a lot. The price was unpublished and the invitation was to register for more information. I did. Later that day I received an email letting me know that our church was “incompatible” with their mission. It turns out that their algorithms marketed to me for words like “church” and “Christian”, but they manually exclude for words like “gay”. I confess to still feeling the boil of righteous indignation as I daily see the ad on my site.

All of which should have been a teachable moment to ignore the ads to the right. But I fear that my foray to the right opened a door that will not easily be closed.

This week there has been a recurrent ad for beautiful housewares at rock bottom prices. Though not normally swayed by ads, I confess to being a shopper and this particular ad delivered. Perhaps it was the slowness of the morning, or the way the stars aligned in the night, but regardless the reason I went to their website. I want to be clear that I did not click the Facebook link, I simply noted the shopping web name and typed it into a browser window, believing this to be the safe route to internet exploration. And perhaps it would have been so if I hadn’t responded to the site’s opening welcome box requesting information. Never, never, never give any personal information to a shopping website; I have received dozens of phone calls and emails since the fateful visit. (FYI: the bargains really weren’t so much.)

The lure of a well placed ad, and the offense of a not-so well placed ad, are powerful. Don Draper weekly bears witness to marketing’s intrigue. Given that 250 million people all around the world are connected and conversing with one another on Facebook, all at no cost to themselves, a few revenue generating ads are to be expected. The moral of the story for Facebook users is to be savvy in our responses.

As I opened my Facebook screen this morning, well rested with coffee in hand, I spotted the irony of the new ad right off. “Love Buddhism? Achieve bargain Nirvana with savings on Buddhist books, art, Buddha sculptures and more!” Perfect: achieve nonattachment through acquisition! This is an ad that I can avoid.

Now, if I could only keep my gaze in the center of the page…

(Note: ads above were parodies from http://www.urlesque.com/2011/01/31/30-facebook-ad-parodies/)

As I enjoy my second (or is it third?) cup of coffee on this late April morning, the sound of a soaking rain gentles my soul. Uncharacteristically warm this spring, the windows are open and I’m listening to the water meet the now softened earth. When the rain begins, it bounces from the earth but now, as the earth is yielding and ready, the rain’s touch sounds nurturing. The same rain that battered is now caressing.

In a reading this week, I came across the timeless wisdom that if we choose to be a victim we will continue to be oppressed. I can argue for and against this truth, but at the end of the day, my serenity rests in my acceptance of it.

The fact of the matter is that there is evil in this world. And, worse, there is grief. All manner of ills may come at us, but grief wells up from within. Resentment is born in the meeting and often the roots go deep. As long as our focus remains on the external sources, our spiritual healing is stalled and our misery fixed.

To embrace this truth is not to become impotent, quite the contrary. The paradox is that as we recognize and become responsible for what is happening internally, we become more empowered to make choices that pave the way for greater justice and peace in the world around us.

Doing the internal work, I get honest about the buttons installed by my family of origin, the culture of my youth, and my own instincts. These buttons were perhaps well intended and likely served a useful purpose, but as automatic responses they’ve become unhelpful. The irony is that if I want to disable them, I first have to acknowledge them.

Some of the internal stuff is biological. Recently I read about the role of our biological self that gifts us with fight-flight instincts. Although helpful in our hunter-gatherer incarnations, most of the situations we face today would be oh so much better served with a cup of tea and an open heart. Doing our internal work is actually allowing our brain the needed space and time to listen to and then override our instincts.

Pondering our instincts, both biological and learned, we often find fear. Fear is powerful agent of control; silence a common symptom of its effective engagement. When we begin to name the fear and own our own truth, the control effect is diminished. When we begin to consider the source of our breath, the place of our security, the invitation to trust in a power greater than our own, the fear begins to dissipate. To be sure, there are systemic issues to address and interpersonal relations to attend, but the first order of business is spiritual.

Healing from the inside out, we approach oppression in new ways. Perhaps it is as our souls are cultivated and ready that the worthy seed can take root and we can more readily identify and remove the offending weed. Without having carefully considered the desired harvest, however, seed and weed are often mistaken. Healing from the inside out, more keenly aware of the oneness of creation, we begin the work to plant seeds of justice and compassion in the communities where we work and worship and learn.

The earth is full with the morning rain; the owl is sharing a song. The song is timeless but my hearing new. I am grateful for the lessons that come slowly but touch deeply and bring new life.

My name is Katy, and I am a cat person.

There are some seemingly innocuous word combinations that cannot be spoken without judgment. “Oh, you’re a cat person” is one of them. Although I have heard the phrase spoken once with reverence, the other hundred thousand times I’ve been on the receiving end of the utterance, it didn’t feel so affirming. In truth, I do live in a house with cats; too many of them.

Once upon a time we had two cats. They were fully mature and friendly while being sedate, the way all good pets should be. And it was very good. Then a kitten happened upon our family and we discovered a terrible truism. Two cats are two cats; three cats are a clowder (old English for ‘cats everywhere’). Two cats means you buy cat food at the grocery, three means you buy cases at Costco. Two cats means you share your bed with felines, three means you get a new (biggest possible) bed and hope they share with you. Two cats means you buy the fancy self scooping litter box from Petsmart, three means you enroll with Amazon’s “Subscribe and Save” for (ominous drumroll) litter boxes (recycled and biodegradable, of course).

It’s not that I don’t understand when I hear the slight cluck of the tongue with the “oh, you’re cat people”, I am all too keenly aware of the downside of cat hospitality. But what ‘cat people’ know that not-cat people don’t is that we do not choose cats. Cats choose people, not the other way around. Nowhere is this more true than in the story of our clowder. We were minding our own business one dark and stormy night (true story) when Patrick (aka Little Guy) happened into our lives. We were in the car, turning from Eager Road into the traffic jam of Trader Joe’s when we saw him struggling along the side of the road. He was about five weeks old, sopping wet and freezing cold, just this side of the great divide. The choice was to see or not see.

Which points, I think, to a more fundamental spiritual principle. Our choices in life are often to see or not see, to embrace or not embrace. We have little control over the external circumstances of our lives. We did not choose where to be born or to whom; and surely nothing shapes our destiny quite as much as the continent of our birth and the zip code of our school. We do not choose our workmates or our extended family; we do not choose our race, ethnicity, gender or orientation. Yet within a whole lot of givens, we do however choose what to see and with what to make our meaning. We choose to embrace and thrive, or deny and die.

The problem with sight is that the view can be distressing. Little Guy’s condition when we found him was deeply troubling, and his was but a microcosm of the pain of the larger world. The injustices loom large and guilt laps at our feet like quicksand. Our instinct, because we can’t do everything, is to do nothing and bury our heads so as not to see. Watching our healthy six month old terrorize the more gentile felines in our house, I realize that closing our eyes would have made sense. But as I see Little Guy flourish, I also see the joy and wonder that comes from doing the next right thing. An invitation to sight is not an invitation to play god or to take on the cares of the world. An invitation to sight is simply (profoundly) the call to open our hearts, hands and life to what the universe is offering. In our case, it was cat #3.

As I ponder the life that is mine today, I am truly in awe. It is not a life I could have imagined just a few short years ago. To get to this life that is so precious, I had to let go of a life that I loved and embrace a truth that emerged unbidden. Although the losses were (and are) painful, the question that beckoned was not the value of what had been but rather the presence of what was now revealed. The choice was to see or not see, embrace or not embrace, the truth that was mine. Embracing was the impossible path that ultimately led to the life that is now mine.

Jesus said that we have to loose our lives to find them. Jesus was obviously cat person. Although I don’t know if domesticated felines were part of the common life of 1st century Judaism, being a cat person isn’t about possession of felines. Cat people are people who know that they are not in control of their destinies, that life chooses us, that we allow ourselves to be broken open and created anew (or we don’t).

Cat people, I’ve come to understand, are people who choose to love the truth that is unfolding before them. Some cat people have cats, some have dogs, and some have neither or both. Today, I am pausing to revel in the beauty of life, truly it is so very sweet; then I’m headed to Costco for the cat lady sized cart filled with cat food and litter. Yes, I am a cat person.

The moon is full and filled with possibility. The morning dawns with brisk promise, God’s Friday. Today we remember the worst our kind can do and dare to believe in something bigger. We are in the place of deepest night before the dawn in terms of our holiday weekend.

In our community we’ve had the privilege of sharing in Passover, which often coincides with Holy Week. It’s powerful to hear the ancient story, watch the kids’ faces come alive with the connections, remember again the timeless call to justice, and hear the call to humble prayer.

It’s powerful, as a Christian, to consider this feast as the entry point for Jesus’ passion. I am heartened, always, to remember that Jesus was Jewish and that this annual feast was one that he too practiced. I am encouraged to know that he too remembered the saltiness of the tears (salt water on parsley) and the scurry of flight (unleavened bread). I am moved, as always, that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were and are an embodiment of an even older story.

Jordy reminded us last night that we are not free until all are free. Jesus staked his life on that claim. And I am struck by the lack of freedom for so many in our world. I hold the families of Trayvon Martin (Sanford FL) and Anna Brown (St. Louis MO) in my prayers today. I am move through the day mindful of the more than 2 million Americans incarcerated today, of the 17 million American households who are food insecure, and the ½+million homeless Americans… let alone the hunger, thirst, imprisonment of those around the world.

As the wine glasses filled and emptied, filled and emptied (four times all together), I was struck by the power of the prayer: Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam (Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe).

Even as we remember what isn’t right with the world, even when we remember our call to be repairers of the breach, especially now we say: Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam (Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe).

And in between each reading, we share the delight of our table companions: laughing, sharing festive foods, and watching children’s wide-eyed wonder. We rail, we weep, we pray… and life goes on. We learn to live life on it’s own terms and trust God for all that remains unresolved.

Much like the truth of Passover, our Easter story is a call to honor the already even as we tend the not yet. As we face the worst our kind can do before turning our eyes to the empty tomb, we are aware that He has risen, but there is work to be done.

But like the moon that rises each month and the leaves that burst forth each spring, our stories remind us of a presence and power beyond our own in whom we can place our trust. The new day has dawned and with it a long list of chores. But first, I pause to give thanks.

Warning: Working in a church the week before Holy Week is invariably heavy and inevitably affects a pastor’s pondering. In addition to the workload in preparation for the holy days, the emotional tones of the stories that lead up to Easter are heart rending. If we dare to look deeply into our stories, the pain is palpable. Ours is story of unnecessary and unimaginable suffering. Yet from a place of pain at the outer edge of our imagination, comes a story of hope.

Of course it is our human inclination to reach for the hope without the rest of the story. Like a steady diet of chocolate chip cookies, it works until it doesn’t. We might enjoy the taste of the cookies until our bodies start to revolt from lack of nutrition. Likewise we might enjoy and share the festival of Palm Sunday and Easter without the drama of the week in between, but after time even the festivals become hollow without the sustenance of the painful chapters that make them possible.

I am not a believer in the ‘no pain, no gain’ approach to life, but I can bear witness to the truth that the most beautiful blossoms in my life have come after the earth of my soul has been tilled. I know that the exquisite joy in holding my newborn babies came after the hell of something euphemistically called ‘labor’. And I know that when I eat green things, bitter though they may be, my body simply feels better.

To be sure we have likely had experiences of the telling of the so-called passion narrative (the last week of Jesus’ life) that were unhealthy and unhelpful. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” a few years ago was a rendering that created controversy and drama promising to pave the road to Easter’s hope; but it didn’t. In fact Passion Plays around the world offer to do just that, and tragically have a history of unleashing anti-Semitic violence rather than Easter hope. Reveling in the gore of an ancient story is not likely to bring modern hope.

In the wake of these common offerings, the temptation to move from Palm Sunday’s parade to Easter’s festival is certainly understandable, but we miss compelling invitations to touch the spiritual truth of the story that will enable a deeper encounter not only with the pain but more profoundly with the hope.

As I listened at the vigil for Trayvon Martin last Friday night, and heard the story of the broken body of God’s son, I realized again that the stories that will most helpfully illumine our Easter hope are not simply the ancient ones but rather the timeless ones. The call of our holy week isn’t to remember an ancient evil but rather to face a modern one. To acknowledge, own, name, the worst our kind can do… to put it out on the table and weep loudly. Call the wailing women and lament. Having allowed our hearts to acknowledge the place of lament, the exquisite beauty of the empty tomb will mean so much more than we could otherwise have imagined.

I am reminded of the powerful work that Desmond Tutu shared with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The cornerstone of the work was to acknowledge that real healing can come from neither polite denial nor vengeance; that spiritual healing requires an honest accounting of the wrongs done before releasing them. Easter comes when the Roman Empire is acknowledged and held accountable. The tomb is empty only after the oppressors are named and faced. He has risen comes after we’ve gotten honest about the fact that he’s suffered and died.

As I sit with the heaviness of the story this week, with justice still absent in Sanford, I feel myself falling into the despair of the week that is ours as humans, trusting that on the other side we will again find the exquisite wonder of an empty tomb. And so the week begins…

Note for Peace UCC folk: Liturgically (in our church community), we’ll have two important opportunities next week to hold this spiritual truth. One is the ancient and timeless celebration of Passover with a Seder (potluck, family-friendly) dinner on Thursday (April 5 @6pm); here we move from lament (slavery in Egypt, the plagues, the escape) and into joy (freedom). The other opportunity is through a contemporary story shared by poet Treasure Shields Redmond on Friday (April 6 @7pm); the poetry reading will be followed by an (optional) time of prayer evoking the parallel images of Jesus’ last week.

I am not Trayvon Martin.

I grieve for his senseless murder. I pray for his mother and father. I pledge to be a voice demanding not only justice for Trayvon but safety for all of our young men. But I am not Trayvon.

I am a white woman who’s lived most of her life in the suburbs watching America’s vicious endless cycle of racism from the seat of white privilege. The closest I’ve ever come to being suspicious is holding hands with a woman, yet even as I am aware of my vulnerability I am still not suspicious. Honestly, I don’t know what it feels like to be trailed in store and watched on the street. And the most honest thing I can do today is to admit that I don’t.

Perhaps compassion’s call is to be honest about what we can’t and don’t know. As I read Tim Wise’ reflection on the unconscionable murder and duplicity in Florida, I was struck by his powerful if rudimentary call to white folks to begin simply with empathy. Wise writes:

“Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn’t work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.
“Empathy, which is always among the first casualties of racist thinking, mandates our acceptance of the possibility that maybe it isn’t those long targeted by oppression who are exaggerating the problem or making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, but rather we who have underestimated the gravity of racial domination and subordination in this country, and reduced what are, in fact, Everest-sized peaks to ankle-high summits, and for our own purposes, rather than in the service of truth.”

Empathy begins when my eyes and heart and ears are open, and sometimes it’s painful. As luck would have it, I had a chance to practice listening this week when I ran into an old friend.

I hadn’t seen this young friend in many months, and I know him from days when we both lived in another neighborhood. When I saw him this week we were both on the other end of town, a place where neither of us now live. Delighted to see this old friend, my smile was wide and my tone warm. But my words were careless and carried unintended hurt. “What are you doing over here?” Really? It was wrong on so many levels. And for just an instant his eyes said “ouch”. It happened so quickly that I didn’t even know that I’d oopsed until I was unpacking the look I saw flit across his face. By the time I heard my offense, the moment had passed and we were miles apart physically as well as experientially.

As I’ve considered my chance encounter this week and reviewed the intention behind my stupid query, the reality that I am not Trayvon is fundamental to understanding how I oopsed. My intention in my albeit stupid query was the out of context nature of seeing a friend from an old neighborhood in new one; that I would have made a similar comment regardless of the racial contexts. Regardless of my intent, the words carried a very particular and particularly hurtful challenge. Even if my words were as innocent as I would like to believe, their hurt was unmistakable.

As I type, I am aware of a myriad of unpleasant feelings, but fear is not one of them. Because even when I’m acting out and being stupid, I am not suspicious. Here’s the thing: Trayvon didn’t get that privilege. And neither did my friend. His presence in the other-side neighborhood is suspicious, as if there is a reason that he happens to be at the same McDonald’s as I. As if there is an over there where he belongs that is different than the over here where we are. As if simply be standing in a McDonalds with a bag of fries he is somehow worthy of interrogation.

If my empathy had been more developed, if I had more of an understanding of what it is be viewed constantly and continuously as suspicious, I would have had an internal filter to catch the oops before it left my mouth. Unless and until I develop empathy, I will continue to make stupid comments.

And because I am not Trayvon Martin, the only way I can develop the empathy is to listen to those who are. For now, there is one thing I can do. Shut up and listen. As a white lady who claims to care about justice, now is an incredibly important time for me to be listening to not-white voices. For just such a cloud of witness, I am grateful. So very very grateful. And I am listening.

Reminder: Prayer Vigil for Trayvon Martin in St. Louis (Tower Grove Park, 3/23 @7pm)

It’s Thursday evening, time to consider pondering, and my head feels as though it has been invaded by aliens with water guns. Although I am certain I will live to tell the tale, I’m at the place of head cold misery that makes any out appealing.

With spring bursting forth it seems quite unfair to be inside under blankets, but the wonder of the weather blows through every corner of our home. Head colds are a fact of life, they come and go with their misery in tow. But so too the dogged promise of spring, which has come remarkably early to St. Louis this year. With the windows open in the dusky light, I hear the neighbor chattering, the traffic in the distance, and the birds singing with abandon.

I feel unfaithful to the promise by calling it a day, closing my computer screen and my eyelids… but perhaps it is itself an act of faith. Believing in the promise, I can let go my grip on this day and yield to my body’s plea for rest.

And so it is that in deference to the cold, and in honor of the spring, I log my first official “unpondering”.