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Nothing like a family funeral to sow salt powder into the clouds. Everyone does their duty--puts on their funeral clothes and somber faces, fills their pockets with clichés: "I am sorry for your loss,” or “They’re in a better place.” Duties are done, flowers are ordered, donations are made but old hurts are awakened and they simmer as they keep the phone lines open: “Do you remember when…” As I near the peak of life expectancy, I can’t believe this is still going on--even in me and my own extended family. It seems to me that, by now, we are all older and should have some life experience and perspective. We’ve all been through stuff. Hard stuff. When we hope for understanding and acceptance, why is it so hard to give? Looking back, maybe that aunt wasn’t rude; maybe she was just painfully shy to the point of avoidance. Maybe an aunt literally shopped ‘til she dropped to keep memories of a savage beating in a public square at bay. Maybe the cousin who couldn’t hold a job wasn’t just a loser. Maybe he was a kid overwhelmed on the inside by a frantic level of anxiety and ADHD as he tried to negotiate life in a family so busy that they invented the word frenzied. Maybe the jovial aunt WAS funny, but she was also cruel and hot-tempered at times--and maybe a bit too often. Maybe the uncle with the bad temper wasn’t mad at the world. Maybe he was stuck in a grief that had overwhelmed him since childhood. Maybe a cousin wasn’t just an addict, maybe he drank to medicate horrific memories of losses that time would not heal. On earth, we are all flawed humans. Maybe we invented the idea of heaven because we all desire to be better, perfect even, and we know we just can’t do it on our own. The promise of the after-life is that we will be made perfect, but what is this perfection that gives us hope? Do we expect all of the manufacturing flaws that burdened us on earth to be erased? I wonder about that version of heaven and of God. Maybe heaven is heavenly because we surrender our defenses at the gate. Once inside, we won’t need them anymore because, just maybe, in heaven, the streets are not lined with gold, but our hearts are lined with mercy, mercy for ourselves and for each other. When I was a freshman in high school, I had to memorize “The Quality of Mercy” from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The words come back to me now: The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Tis the mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown… It is an attribute to God himself. At this personal moment and in these stormy times, we could us a gentle rain…Lord, have mercy.
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As I read the help wanted ad for a Newborn Photographer, something unexpected came into focus. I pictured a hospital nursery where a delicate new human being lay in a bassinette swaddled by a soft blanket, a tiny camera around its neck and a press badge for an identification card. I wondered: with career trajectory assured, would this be the beginning of a life of heavenly ease or one of hellish adversity? What if our children came into the world and were immediately labeled not by their genders but by their future occupations? Gone would be the tiny blue and pink caps. In their places would be symbols of their work: cameras and hammers, rolling pins and guns. If we could see into their professional futures, how would we relate to our children? Would it change the way we feel about them? Would they belong to us or to the marketplace? What would our responsibility be as parents in shaping them for a future already assigned at birth, possibly a career that we know nothing about or one that frightens us? Would we embrace some labels and resist others trying to bargain with God to give us the outcome WE dreamed of? And what if the birth certificate said, “Career Criminal,” and the State Department of Vital Statistics said no changes to assignments made at birth will be allowed? Being assigned a career at birth would spare every child that often-asked question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At points of uncertainty and struggle in my own life, I have envied those people who seemed born knowing what they were meant to do with their lives-- that child of a firefighter who followed her parent to the firehouse, or the computer software developer who found a career with an operating system that echoed that of his own mind. In such imaginings, I envied the freedom from the weight of so many choices, protection from costly missteps, and the opportunity to give the lifetime of focused attention needed to become a young master. Years of life, hours of self-doubt, and thousands of dollars could be saved by making the life choices compatible with our callings. But then I wonder, would such an assignment have freed me or become its own prison? Without trial and error, what would I have given up? What would I have learned about life? Not learned? Who would I not have met? What places might I not have visited or lived? Would the people I consider my dearest, life-long friends still be in the picture as I grow old? And what would I have missed in the struggle that made me who I am? Who I was meant to be? When I project into the future of that Newborn Photographer I try to imagine them creating snapshots of other peoples’ lives and adventures and realizing that they don’t want to take pictures. They want to dance or create delicious food or fly airplanes. With a birth certificate that says “photographer” will they be able to get a different job? Travel freely about the world? Will they become a rebel? A failure? A social outcast? What pain would there be for them living out their days as a photographer when their heart whispers, “I was born for something else?” And what if though assigned, they are not very good at it? What about the self-doubt and self-hatred, the frustration for a lifetime? This leads me to the question: is identity something we are given or something we make? Something we make by association with others and their identities? And why it is acceptable, encouraged even, to lie about some aspects of our identity such as age? To be flattered by misleading others about how long we have lived? Long ago we accepted plastic surgery and youth-promoting products and services – it is okay to lie about your age and surgically transform your appearance if you don’t want to look old or feel old. We applaud the talent and the technology that makes that possible. And yet we consider it a “lie” or wrong if someone is uncomfortable with the gender assigned at birth. We have confused gender‘s social expression with chromosomes and see gender as something given and permanent as opposed to something learned and contrived by society to create a certain order. Surely, the chromosomes don’t change, but what about their expression? Humans created all the rules that define gender expression. Why can’t the rules change as they have for the expression of aging? We feel the most comfortable, the most competent, in the presence of the things we understand. But the world changes and some discomfort is the price of change in order to reap its benefits. It can mean learning a new vocabulary. This can cause resentment in people who feel awkward when they don’t know the jargon, the social courtesies, the rules of engagement and inclusion. It is easier to belittle and dismiss those whose choices make us uncomfortable. Those choices can challenge our own sense of self and identity. These social changes can shake something we thought we knew with certainty about ourselves and the way the world works, but people have always been created this way; they were just prohibited from expressing it. In addition, the world is facing a climate disaster and shrinking habitable environments. Wouldn’t it make sense that Mother Nature would shrink the size of her family to preserve resources for the survival of those born? And what about industry’s impact on gender? The hormone-disrupting chemicals that enter our bodies through the air, the soil, the food supply, the products we rub into our skin and wear on our backs that are changing our biology and, perhaps, adding some confusion in our biological development? There have been so many other social changes in my lifetime, changes that sent shock waves through our culture, changes we now accept as the norm. Among them are organ transplants, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, IVF, single parenthood, divorce, and extended adolescence, men who are gentle and caring. Remember when it was a radical practice for a woman to keep her own name when marrying? Preserve her own identification with the family from which she came? Now she will need her birth name to prove she is a citizen! In nature, we don’t always recognize the gender of God’s creatures, but we admire them still for their beauty, the sound of their song, their graceful movements, and their part in a creation that is wild, mysterious, and magical. Can we not stand back and appreciate the qualities that make us human over those that identify our genders? Through fairy tales like the Ugly Duckling or the Little Mermaid, The Chicken and the Eagle, and pauper kings, we send children a mixed message about identity. We tell these stories to encourage them to “be all they can be,” until it disrupts our view of “normal.” Isn’t pride something we all want to feel about who we are and where we come from? Pride is not earned by taking it from someone else. Sure, it is complicated. We cannot tap our phones and find an answer. It requires education, struggle, living with discomfort, and ultimately, it requires conversation to reach not just an understanding, but an appreciation, of who we are individually and collectively. For me, now, when hate and cruelty are becoming the social norm, I am more concerned about a person’s expression of character than I am about their expression of gender. Perhaps we do need a newborn photographer, one who is destined to capture us in a better light. She’s my little deuce coupe. You don’t know what I’ve got. – The Beach Boys
My old car shakes and rattles as it rolls. Despite good maintenance, I cannot undo the damage done by that exhausting passenger Time. For the many practical and financial reasons we all know, I dread the day a mechanic says, “She’s gone. There was nothing more we could do to save her.” As my old coupe edges closer to the graveyard, I feel a swell of fondness for her. This anticipatory grief leads me to wonder: when do things, people, places, and experiences cease to be new? What is the turning point at which they lose their sparkle? When we begin to take them for granted and pursue something else? When we lose enthusiasm for their care and curse the burden maintenance has become? When we buy into all of the advertising that new is always better? At other moments in my life when faced with loss or change, I have thought that if a genie popped out of my teapot and granted me one wish, my wish would be to see things again as for the first time and re-experience the wonder and the delight when those things were new and were mine at last. Today and during this difficult period in which we are living, I am going to do my best to not wait for the genie. I am going to challenge myself to try seeing people, places, things, and experiences again for the first time--before they are gone, before I write the eulogy. If I can’t make them new maybe I can reinvigorate my memories. Today when I get into my old car I will remember the day I drove it off the new car lot. I will picture all of the adventures in between that day and this: college visits with my children, filling the car with Christmas trees and Christmas presents, a million trips to the grocery store, friends who filled the passenger seats, trips across the country where I made new friends, listening to NPR and singing along to classic Motown CDs. I will bless the old coupe for the thousands of safe rides here and there and back home again. At 69, my own weary frame now rattles, weary from the miles I’ve traveled, from the bumps in the road and the shocks absorbed. To remember and to treat ourselves, our things, our places, our work, our people as though they were new is to experience and to express the deepest form of gratitude and to spare ourselves regret. I guess the miles and the people and the experiences are woven into the fabric of me. Maybe I don’t want to untie all of those threads and start over with everything new. Can we really make things “good as new” when time has already made them better? On this date in 1743 Thomas Jefferson was born. On this date in 2025 I imagine him rolling over in his grave, clawing at the earth in a desperate attempt to salvage the democracy he helped to birth.
Some time ago, I read a work by a historian who said that Thomas Jefferson never imagined that someone like Donald Trump could ever be elected president. Jefferson had more faith in Americans than that. Despite the inventor, thinker, and writer that he was, I guess Jefferson never imagined the power of social media to corrupt the flow of information along with our minds, morals, and democracy. As the news becomes more grim these words (attributed to Voltaire) have been on repeat in my mind: Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. In honor of Jefferson's birthday, I would ask that you send a birthday note or card or email to your elected representatives and share this quote. Ask them, "How far are you willing to go in supporting Donald Trump's agenda?" Demand a reply. Courage is the sister of anger, and so my sisters and brothers, let's honor our forefathers today. Pick up a pen, a phone, a tablet, or a laptop and let our elected officials know we are watching, and we will not allow them to destroy us, our fellow citizens, or our inheritance. So much of life is like an awkward blind date. When we meet people for the first time, we know nothing of their story. Generally, we want to make a good impression, but we don’t know their tastes or the scars that conceal their tender places. All we have for a point of reference is our own past, and yet, like it or not, we share the history of a country, a culture, and a world that was set spinning long before we were born. Even our smallest encounters carry the weight of that history. During the COVID pandemic, I drove across town to pay my rent. It was an early morning in June. The city was showered with sunlight and gentle breezes. Lavender and geraniums were abloom in landscaped yards and sidewalk planters, but it was not long into my journey before I noticed the boarded-up store fronts and the city work crews cleaning up debris from Black Lives Matter protests. When I arrived at the real estate office I noticed a worn ladder propped up against the side of the building. It was blocking the path to the drop box. I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up. A slender, graying man looked down: a black man in a vulnerable position looking down on a white woman. Instinctively, we both felt the weight of America’s history of race. I looked back down to study the space around the ladder. Could I safely squeeze past? I looked up. “I just want to drop my rent payment into the box.” He looked back, “Okay, then,” even as he kept his eyes on me. For a moment we were both afraid. His fear was that I would kick down the ladder and leave him stranded on a hot roof. My fear was that I was causing him discomfort and that he would see me as someone dangerous—not a person I wanted to be. Each of us was just trying to do a normal activity: he was trying to earn a living; I was trying to pay my rent on time. I wanted to say, “You don’t need to fear me.” I wanted to offer to stay there and keep watch over the ladder so that he could work without the distraction of ensuring the ladder’s safety, but our words of reassurance can be shallow to people shaped by a different history, people who have lived their entire lives prepared for the worst in people. And would that offer have embarrassed him? Reminded him of the very things he most feared? It seemed like an awkward, no-win situation. The encounter affected me, and I worried about the man for the rest of the day. Driving home, I was reminded of another situation many years earlier. I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh working part-time in a treatment program for adolescents. The teens came to our program every weekday after school and spent the afternoons and evenings attending groups, sharing meals, and participating in therapeutic activities. Many of the youth were from inner-city neighborhoods. Part of my job was to drive each of them home at night. One night I headed out into the dark in an old station wagon filled with teenagers. With the last two remaining passengers, I proceeded to the housing project where the young man lived. As I started to slow down in front of his unit, a warning light began to glow on the car’s dashboard. I could see from the rearview mirror that the young man had seen the light too. He became alarmed and said to me, “DO NOT get out of the car! They don’t like white people here. I will get my dad.” I and my last passenger waited in the car as instructed. The young man’s father came and lifted the car’s hood. He peered inside with a flashlight. Slamming the lid, he said, “I think you will be all right.” Thankfully, all went well, and I dropped off the last teen and returned to the treatment center and parked the company car. All of these years later, I still wonder about that young man and the dissonance he had to live with daily growing up in an environment of hurt turned to hate. He was a young black man, and I was a young white woman. Clearly, he was filled with concern for my safety on that dark night even as he understood the anger and hatred that existed in his neighborhood. I wondered, how do people go about developing normal relationships when we grow up with such different and frightening messages about groups of other people? How do we keep hurt from becoming hate from becoming revenge? I hope that sweet young man found a way to navigate his circumstances without being destroyed by them. I have not suffered the insults or the fears that either of these black men in our culture has endured, but I am a woman in this culture. I have my own set of fears and my own flames of outrage. In that, we have much in common amidst much that is different. We each have known the pain of being vulnerable and the dangers of trying to defend ourselves. We know that standing up for ourselves often means more labels and being dismissed as an “angry ____.” You can fill in the blank with the stereotypes. Going into the workforce right out of high school in 1974, I experienced the blatant sexual discrimination and harassment that was common then. I went to work for a large, well-respected law firm. All men. It was common for them to make inappropriate sexual remarks or jokes that made the women who worked there uncomfortable, or to try to touch or kiss…When the first female law clerks were hired, they were told openly, “If you plan to have children, don’t even think about working here.” It was a point of pride that no woman had ever sat in the boardroom. To complain likely would have meant the end of employment for women during that time. We endured, and we had each other. And, eventually, things did change. The women law clerks hung in there. Years later, some became partners and had children too. I worked at the law firm to finance my way through college. After graduation, I went onto graduate school where I saw that white men benefitted from diversity and inclusion efforts too. Social work is and has been a predominantly “female” occupation. To attract more men to the program and to the profession, my graduate program offered many generous full scholarships to men while I and the women I knew did not receive the same substantial financial assistance. We befriended our male colleagues and lived with it. We understood that white males were not generally attracted to the jobs held by women and other minorities because the reality is those jobs just didn’t pay as well as the jobs more typically dominated by white men—at least back then. And back then, men may not have had the same freedom to pursue careers in fields dominated by women because of the social scorn they might have received. After graduate school, I went to work in a community mental health center. While I was working there a professional position opened at a prestigious university’s Child Study Center. I was very interested in the job, the university, and that part of the country, and so I applied. I received a phone call from a woman at the university inviting me for an interview. She ended the invitation by saying, “We are looking to hire a minority candidate; so if you are not a minority candidate, I wouldn’t invest the money in travel.” I did not schedule an interview. Though a woman, I was no longer a minority candidate in the professional community…much had changed since I left high school. Even now, all of these years later, with so much anger about race and diversity, I cannot be angry about the lost interview opportunity. I felt it was someone else’s turn to have a chance. I accepted that this was the road that led to change. I always assumed the person hired would be both a minority candidate and a competent individual. It would be lovely to think that after all of these years, it would be unnecessary to have quotas or to make such direct efforts to hire a more diverse work force, and yet…And maybe so much of the current anger about DEI efforts has to do with the opportunities technology has taken away from humans not what DEI has done. We are fighting over the scraps of the remaining good jobs, and we blame each other… In this time of rancor about DEI programs and efforts to further social equality, people quickly jump to conclusions, and so we can fear speaking at all because we might be accused of being some “ist” or “ism.” The only way to win this war of confusion is to go out on a limb and assume that most people are well-meaning even if naïve—good at heart but with different experiences. Every person has a point of view and their own scrapes with culture and history. No one wants to be belittled. All sides want to be heard and understood. We can choose interpretations that fuel anger and hostility widening the divides in our country, or we can choose interpretations that educate and lead to insight and understanding. We need to keep talking with compassion until we find the eloquence to express what is true. Like blind dates, we can expect that the first encounters will be awkward, but good and lasting relationships can be built between hopeful strangers with good intentions. This is a little late getting out, but I’m…
Well, the truth is, I’m tired. And that summarizes the state of the union: the American people are tired. Sure, COVID took a toll on all of us, maybe even broke us—turned many into angry, lonely, conspiracy theorists bloated by too much take-out food and hopeless from stubborn inflation and a housing crisis. We could move on if we could find our breath, but let’s face it, COVID was just a slice of the weary pie. What else is making us so tired? We’re tired of chaos and anarchy—people who live in a world of one and want to tell the rest of us how to live. We’re tired of leaders and executives who could have, should have, would have…but waited until their book was published to speak out. We’re tired of elected officials who care only about THEIR futures, politicians who work for their own interests and forget the people they represent. Now they want to skip town halls. They don’t want to face the music. They cover their eyes like toddlers and pretend you can’t see them if they can’t see you. In typical take-no-responsibility-fashion, they dismiss the feelings of the people, the will of the people, by creating yet another conspiracy theory--paid hecklers. We’re tired of disparate justice. A man steals from rich white folks in a Ponzi scheme and gets 150 years in prison. A group of people stage an assault on the U. S. Capitol, the peoples’ house, causing destruction and death, and it is called a love fest, and the perpetrators are pardoned. We’re tired of the worn vocabulary, tired of hearing about “elites” from people who could not be more elite: Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and most other elected officials. We’re tired of the term “woke,” a misused label applied to people who care about others and a more equal society, a misuse of the word to disparage and silence others from waking up to what is really happening. We’re tired of the dismissal of concerns with the label “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Truth is, as many experts have pointed out, Trump is deranged. We’re tired of hearing, “what about the other guy” as a defense for bad behavior and lack of effort and productivity. Our representatives are too busy trying to find fault and shame with the other side to get any real work done. We’re tired of hearing about “the base” and other mythical armies. The majority of Americans set themselves apart from the mysterious base. The majority of Americans are not base and do not want to be associated with base behavior. The majority of Americans are honorable and decent. We work hard and try to be good neighbors, thoughtful consumers, and educated voters. We are tired of Elon Musk and his money-saving charade. You want to save money? How about no more weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago at the taxpayer’s expense? Why doesn’t the President stay home in the house that Americans provided? We all know what’s going on—charging us for travel, to play golf, and house a security detail to make a personal estate more profitable. How about selling the Vice President’s home? Let him purchase his own place. How about we cut back on perks to government officials? Let’s put elected officials on Social Security and let them find their own health insurance instead of providing them with Cadillac benefits the rest of Americans cannot afford. The way Elon Musk and this administration treat America’s federal work force does not say, Make America Great Again. It says, Make Americans Grovel again--more of the administration’s campaign of humiliation and cruelty. Finally, we’re tired of Donald Trump. Tired of hearing him. Tired of hearing about him. Tired of looking at him. #47, you have not made America great again. You have broken the promises that got you elected. You have worn us out, made us tired. You shout “law and order” as you violate every rule of law, every rule of decency, every social courtesy. You shame us in front of the world. If you want to be a celebrity and live in a fictional universe, move to Hollywood and get out of the White House. Listening to you is like being tortured to death by nails on a chalkboard. Asking you to go away will simply fuel your oppositional, vengeful nature, and you will turn up the volume and the frequency. You are the biggest reason Americans are so weary. You have drained the swamp—of its last bits of remaining decency--and it turns out that you are the swamp creature. You are remaking America in your image: cruel and hate-filled, fake tan, fake wealth, fake love of country. And now you want to be King. Well, you already are, The Lyin’ King, with 30,000 documented lies just from your first term in office. Word has leaked that you desperately want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but you have no insight into the actions or the heart of a peacemaker. You have demonstrated that you are incapable of empathy, forgiveness, and peace. Perhaps you have no inner peace from which to draw on. You are a man at war with everyone and everything that is decent. Life is a retribution campaign not a peace march. Because of you, the entire world order has been disrupted. Where will weary Americans find the strength to face a war? You have not made America great again. In a few short weeks, you have made America friendless, frightened, and soon, broke. Beds are opening up at Guantanamo. Maybe that will be the only place left for the weary to go by the time #47 is through with us. Just before he died on the cross, Jesus cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Forsaken. It is a word so potent that I fear to say it out loud. But on this day when I am filled with grief, I cry out, “Where are you, God?” There is no immediate answer. And so, as I do when I am troubled, I go for a walk. On my third lap around an enormous parking lot a woman steps out of the lone car parked there and asks me, “May I walk with you? My name is Rita.” Rita explains that she is waiting for her roommate to finish work on the building’s security detail. Happy for some company to interrupt my thoughts in the desolate lot, I eagerly say, “Yes!” I slow to Rita’s pace and to her conversation. The woman quickly opens up about her life and family. As we approach a beautiful courtyard, she asks, “Can we sit down?” We enter the courtyard and sit on facing benches. She tells me about her 90-year-old mother who suffers from dementia. Rita’s mother no longer remembers Rita when they are face-to-face, but she remembers a daughter named Rita and describes her daughter to this stranger that adult Rita has become. Rita laughs at the insights these conversations provide about how her mother feels about the daughter she remembers. Rita speaks of her love for her mother and about leaving home as a young bride. She speaks about missing her mother and then begins to tell me something: “After I left, I heard that my mother set the table…” but Rita cannot go on. Her eyes well up with tears, and she turns her face away from mine. Rita covers her quivering lips with her hand, and then she does it…she apologizes for her sadness, for becoming emotional. I lean in and wait. Rita collects herself and turns back to face me. I see that she is embarrassed and fears resuming the conversation. I say, “It is clear that your mother missed you too.” This acknowledgment and acceptance remove the emotional chokehold on Rita’s throat, and the conversation continues. Rita has lived away from her mother’s home for a lifetime. In the intervening years, Rita has become a mother, a grandmother, and a great grandmother, and yet she is moved to tears by this memory of being loved, being missed, being longed for, and feeling responsible for that longing, and now, she feels the way her mother once did as her mother’s dementia leaves Rita feeling forsaken. We live in a time when people are feeling overwhelmed by events and some are dying of loneliness, and yet the expression of sadness seems to be the only form of speech that is not acceptable. Nothing is more threatening than to hear that someone is sad or scared or empty. We sense that sadness is dangerous, that we might have to act, and so sadness festers in silence. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ last words before he died--a stunning demonstration of his bravery and his humanity. I asked, “Where are you, God?” He answered, “May I walk with you?” And now my question is this: With 8.2 billion people in the world, need any of us feel forsaken? Walk with someone today. |
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June 2025
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