It occurs to me…

In Uncommon Gratitude, Joan Chittister writes on how “alleluia” can arise out of differences.  This is, of course, a tall order.  When someone does not act as anticipated, we say he or she is “different.”  If we try something new and, when asked to rate the experience, we may say it was “different.”  In these contexts, “different” is rarely just an observation.  Often, “different” has a judgmental connotation to it, or it is used out of politeness to shroud the potentially hurtful judgment.  (To this day, I recall the tone of voice an elementary school teacher had when she commented that my art project was “different.”  We’ve all heard the tone, and I will confess to using it.

On “difference” Chittister writes:

“We learn sameness very early in life and find it hard to stray too far from its boundaries, however old we get, however much we think we’ve moved away from such thinking as time goes on.  Sameness becomes a kind of security blanket that wraps us up in the warm feeling of being acceptable to the groups with which we identify and whose approval we seek.  If we don’t stand out, we can’t be criticized. We are safe because we are just like everybody else….  It is an effective technique, a kind of chameleon approach to life, but it is neither psychologically mature nor spiritually healthy. Somewhere along the line we must become who we are meant to be as individuals. We are persons put on earth to contribute to it as well as take from it…. Most of all, we must allow others to do the same, as much for our sake as for theirs…. It is in our respect for the differences of others that we grow.”

That bears repeating – “It is in our respect for the differences of others that we grow.”  This of course, telegraphs her “punchline:”

“But that is the glorious burden of real Christianity: to follow the one who talked to Samaritan women and Roman soldiers, all the time allowing them to be who they were. Clearly, differences were not made to be homogenized; differences were made to be respected, to be honored, to be cherished. Alleluia.”

A line from one of my favorite songs/songwriters popped into my mind today.  This from Radney Foster’s tune, Half My Mistakes:

“And if I had it all to do over, I’d prob’ly win and lose just as much.  But I’d spend less time on the right and wrong, and a lot more time on love.”

It occurs to me that this line seems to sum up a lot of what is going on these days – we spend more time on being/deciding/judging right and wrong at the expense of listening to, thinking about, considering the opinions and viewpoints of others.  Hell, they may be wrong, I may be wrong.  And, while I don’t want to minimize being right or doing the right thing, the insistence on seeing things in that binary world, particularly when it prevents us from listening to the other perspective, takes us down a path that does not lead to a good place.  Which points me to another Radney Foster song/line (Nobody Wins):

“Before another bitter word gets loose
I was hoping we could call a truce

Cause nobody wins, we both lose
Hearts get broken and love get bruised
When we light that same old fuse
Again and again
Nobody wins slamming doors
We’ve both lost this fight before
And I won’t play that game no more
Cause nobody wins”

Today, Joan Chittister, in Uncommon Gratitude, sings the praises of Doubt.  (I never heard my grade school nuns speak highly of doubt – they only focused on “faith.”)

“Without doubt, life would simply be a series of packaged assumptions, none of them tested, none of them sure, and all of them belonging not to us, but to someone else whose truth we have made our own.  The problem with accepting truth as it … becomes a patina of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the mother of conviction. Once we have pursued our doubts to the dust, we forge a stronger, not a weaker, belief system. These truths are true, we know, because they are now true for us rather than simply for someone else. To suppress doubt, then, to discourage thinking, to try to stop a person from questioning the unquestionable is simply to make them more and more susceptible to the cynical, more unaccepting of naive belief. It is doubt that is the beginning of real faith.”

I like that – “Doubt…is the mother of conviction.”  Yes, knowledge and certainty each have their place, but in the end, for whatever reason, there are things I cannot truly know, things of which I cannot be certain.  As Chittister puts it: “There is simply a point in life when reason fails to satisfy our awareness of what is clearly unreasonable and clearly real at the same time—like love and self-sacrifice and trust and good. Data does not exist to explain these unexplainable things.”

That some things are unknowable does not, of course, excuse me from the quest for knowledge, and I am too stubborn for that in any event, but it does provide me with some understanding of that which I cannot understand.  Onward through the fog.

Photo taken in Hawaii a few years back.

More from Uncommon Gratitude – on faith:

“The truth is that faith requires the awareness that God is and that God is holding all of us responsible for the other. Being a card-carrying member of a religious tradition does not give us the right to consume the world for our own ends and in the name of God. We do not have the right to loose havoc on the rest of the world in the name of the God we have made in our own image. It is not getting the rest of the world to think and worship as we do that qualifies as real religion. It is giving ourselves for the welfare of the rest of the world to which we are called….

Faith is belief that God is leading us to become in tune with the universe, however different we see ourselves to be.

Faith is trust in the unknown goodness of life without demand for certainty in the science of it.

Faith is belief that the God we call “our God” is either the God of all or cannot possibly be God at all.

Faith is confidence in darkness, for the willingness to trust in the deep-down humanity of others as well as in our own may be the deepest act of faith we can possibly devise.

Faith is the willingness to see God at work in others​—in their needs and ideas, their hopes and plans—as well as in ourselves.

Faith is the certainty that God is working through others just as certainly as God is working through us for the good of all humankind. For those things we sing alleluia. Those are surely the only things that can possibly save the globe from our own unmaking of it.

Faith, real faith, real willingness to forgo our own need to either understand God’s ways with humankind or control them ourselves, is real reason for alleluia.”

In this sense it occurs to me that faith holds both certainty and doubt, both knowing and not knowing.  Perhaps stated another way, faith is not the certainty that I am right, but the certainty that God is right.  Which makes me think of one of my favorite Anne Lamott quotes: “You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Yesterday, in the church library, a book grabbed my attention – Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia For All There Is by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams.  Thumbing through it before a meeting I read this:

“To deal with the meaning of alleluia in life means to deal with moments that do not feel like alleluia moments at all.  But how is it possible to say alleluia to the parts of life that weigh us down, that drain our spirits dry, that seem to deserve anything but praise?”

Later on, it is noted that “every segment of life is both a gift and challenge, both endowment and responsibility,” and that in the Christian tradition, “alleluia” “calls us to see all of life as life-giving, somehow, in some way, whether its present gifting is apparent or not.

Okay, I’m in!  I took the book home.

From Max Ehermann’s Desiderata, which sets on my desk:

“If you compare yourself with others, you will become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

The subtlety I had not previously noted in this is the juxtaposition of “vain and bitter.”  It would seem that in comparing myself to others I should become vain OR bitter.  I am either the lead dog in the pack, or not.  If I compare, I (as the lead dog) am at risk for becoming vain, if I am not the lead dog, I am at risk for becoming bitter.  But it occurs to me that Ehrmann has it correct.  In life, the lead changes often, and ultimately, even the lead dog realizes that there is another pack in front of his/hers.

Photo taken near Puerto Vallarta late last year