The Wonderment

Climate Change, Strangers, and Love's Call

Moving through world as I do, I am daily dependent on the kindness and knowledge of strangers. Most of these are strangers I will never meet, like the people maintaining ocean buoys that track water temperatures and aid in forecasting dangerous storms in time to allow evacuations and preparations. Or like whoever it was who trained the staff at an area restaurant not to block the space the wheelchair sits in the lavatory in order to allow for a lateral transfer, unlike most of the places where folks see that space and fill it will stuff that can’t be moved. I depend on road crews and farmworkers and distribution center workers and pharmacy techs and manufacturers of the medical devices I need. The fact is we all depend on strangers, even when we ourselves belong to one of these groups I’ve named. I’m also a farmer, but I’ve never met the person who grows my rice or who made the balsamic vinegar I adore. We are a world of strangers, dependent upon one another, and in that dependence, vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to someone’s meanness or tyranny, to unjust laws, to climate disruption and violence interrupting or shattering our lives.

 

In Parashat Mishpatim, we are presented with lots of exploration of applying the Ten Commandments. One of the rules that apparently needed some clarification for the recently freed people was how to treat strangers. “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourself know the feelings of s stranger, for you were also strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) This is a reminder about empathy and open-hearted justice for everyone. The people ended up in Egypt because of persistent famine and hunger drove them out of where they made home and into dependence in another land. 

 

As our climate changes and historic rainfall patterns are disrupted, parts of the world have experienced drought for half a decade or more. If you grow everything you have to eat, no one has stores from a good year to make it that long. And so we have today people displaced by climate disruption, making the same awful choice that faced the ancient Israelites: stay and starve for sure or go elsewhere and maybe survive. A great many who are from western Honduras and Guatemala in the migrant caravans along the Mexico-U.S. border are there because of violence and unrest, which always accompanies persistent widespread hunger, and became climate disruption has forced them into the second awful choice: go elsewhere and maybe survive.

 

The loving and faithful response is not to huff impatiently about migrants seeking compassion or to be arrogant enough to believe we ourselves could not be displaced by the changing world or to demonize people who are hurting, afraid and desperately seeking a chance at life. We can focus on four actions as faithful people:

 

1. Immediately relieve, welcome, and make way for these climate and violence-driven refugees
2. Change our laws and policies to protect the vulnerable, the stranger, the one who could be us, and may have been us in the past, to treat all with dignity and compassion rather than belittle and demonize
3. Seek to help communities adversely affected by climate disruption here and around the world mitigate what’s happening and adapt to what we can well predict
4. Be dedicated about adapting our economies globally to slow and adapt to climate disruption

 

What faithful people with loving hearts cannot do is turn away. Love asks more than that from us. We are dependent upon strangers and we are strangers others depend upon. We can be the people who help and harbor others in need. Climate change is real and is disrupting lives and communities, erasing once viable places to live and sending for waves of displaced people needing compassion and a chance to bring their gifts to bear in a place that is still fruitful.

 

Once, today, tomorrow, always we were and are strangers, needing each other. In this time of climate disruption may we remember we need one another,  love boldly, and make way for those fleeing for their lives. For we have been and are strangers and may today, tomorrow, or some day also need protection, welcome, and loving care.

 

Nurturing Empathy and Setting Limits

When suffering is increased in our world through obstinacy and turning away from the cries of the beleaguered, dismissing or downplaying those cries, or suggesting that those now out of resources can simply arrange themselves some more like the people who have lots and lots of resources do, we are dealing with suffering created by a lack of empathy. We have folks creating policies and acting out making more suffering by apparently not being able to imagine themselves in the situation of those they are hurting. 

 

 

Nurturing that capacity for imagination is basic to the spiritual journey and to humane and just human communities. The practice of compassion, learning to appreciate and feel deeply with others is something we encourage folks learning early. And it is something we keep learning through our whole lives. We aren’t born knowing how to be compassionate. We may naturally have a capacity for empathy, but we have to practice and engage it to develop it. We learn compassion through practice, through encountering suffering, and through wanting to help ease the other’s suffering. We learn compassion as we grow sad, or angry, or confused and create suffering in our relationships how to attend to ourselves and to others and to be more generous of heart and kinder than is easy. This is often challenging work and to do it we need space to learn, chances to mess up, and chances to keep on practicing.

 

The limit for our capacity for empathy and compassion is when we are unable to stay present to painful feelings and to suffering — our own and that of others. In spiritual terms, we might speak of this as a hardening of our hearts, or closing the gates of our hearts. We might deflect those painful feelings and set them aside to focus on something more pleasant. We might deny those painful feelings and insist on bad theology such as believing folks who are suffering must be deserving of suffering if they are suffering. We might distract ourselves and dissolve our pain in addictive substances or over-consumption. Part of nurturing a spiritual practice is to be able to be with uncomfortable feelings and in painful situations and still be heartfully present. This is why when the practice becomes uncomfortable, we encourage each other to keep going, and learn, too, the difference between discomfort, pain and unbearable pain. 

 

Consumption of digital media is one of the ways we can connect to one another and nurture empathy and compassion and it is also, in the overuse of it, one of the ways we can limit our capacity for empathy and compassion. What we consume, how much, and how we respond very much matters. 

 

Setting limits is part of making space to know our own feelings, to attend to suffering, to practice compassion and generosity and mindfulness. We might set limits by setting "do not disturb" times on our devices; setting timers for the use of social media or non-stop news; reading a newspaper once a day rather than running a continuous news feed; reviewing our notifications and experimenting with which ones we truly need; observing the Sabbath and putting away digital devices or dropping out of news feeds and social media; reducing our total screen time in a day or a week. Setting limits also means setting aside time to be still, to feel how we are, to respond to what’s happening in the world in constructive ways, to just wait and watch in meditation, contemplative prayer, or plain quiet. Setting these limits voluntarily, and practicing them for days and weeks and months and years, we learn gradually better how to be with discomfort, give ourselves space to imagine how it is to be in someone else’s situation different from our own, and choose when we are reaching overwhelm how to pause and touch the Breath of Being to hold on and stay present.

 

Our world needs each of us with our hearts of compassion to care for this planet and for one another. Life has suffering, yes. And yes, we also choose to increase that suffering when we have neither capacity nor inclination to attend to how we ourselves or others are suffering when suffering occurs. May we set limits so we can learn to make space for our hearts in their fullness, and for each other, for caring greatly, boldly, deeply, and better, breath by breath, day by day.

 

For Hearts to Fly

There is so much suffering and grief in this life, in our world. How we do we ever sing anything besides dirges or dance passionately or dream of unknown worlds or launch ourselves into discovering what is yet to be known? 

 

No stranger to the land of sorrow knows how to navigate the muffled world where loss echoes in each sight, sound, taste, and touch. And even if we grow more experienced, it is still odd and unbalancing and disconcerting for who isn’t there, what is gone, where and when we can never go again. It is especially difficult because society, for the most part, expects us to grieve privately and keep doing, to reassure others we’re okay, and generally not to be messy where others might be reminded of their own troubles and pain and especially if they bear any part in the ones we’re experiencing.

 

It is, of course, not only the big sorrows that we must navigate. Life has a multitude of little sorrows, disappointments, failures, misses, and mistakes and how we live with those. Do we allow ourselves to be swept over by shame, guilt, or grief, immobilized and devastated? How much can we bear before it isn’t a matter of what we allow but what tidal wave we cannot possibly hold back? I particularly feel it when I disappoint people greatly, failing on a promise, even if the circumstances are beyond my control. I can easily end up whelmed and miserable, until I can remember to treat myself with the care I would offer a beloved friend. Being out of work or furloughed against our desire, facing stacks of bills and no relief in sight, a misunderstanding, an argument, another day of being less able than yesterday to put on socks or remember the people we love — any of these and more can whirl us into deeper grief and suffering.

 

Amid these sorrows — our losses, our keenly experienced lacks and limits — we yearn for something to help carry us through. Some of us may experience that something as the Holy, or find it in community, or meet that life raft in the arts or in social justice efforts or in hiking through the wilderness. But we who have leagues to go before we sleep and faithful promises to keep cannot touch those centers that help us carry on if we cannot slow down, breathe, and offer ourselves and each other the love and generosity we would to a beloved friend. A friend who is suffering is invited in, offered the soothing comforts we can offer, welcomed into remembering they are loved and lovable, in all this with others who care, and are needed here and now. If you have ever received such a gift from someone when you’ve been in need, you know what a life-changing few moments that gift is. 

 

Whirled up, we need space to slow down, find each other, let our sorrows be what they are. We need space to grieve and to be afraid and we need each other to hold onto, to remind us of how we’re shaped by love and the love we still have to offer. We need generosity and radical welcome, each of us in our own struggles, each with our own sorrows, tending gently to each other. And then we may be surprised to find the song, the breath, the helping hand, the faithful word, the warmth of sunlight that turns us once again to appreciating this world’s goodness alongside this world’s sorrows. We may be surprised to turn once again to bold heartedly living the best we can as we are, finite, broken, yearning, grieving, whelmed and overwhelmed, discovering that here too beside our salty tears, prisms still create rainbows, promises may yet be pursued, and our hearts that have faltered may yet fly.