The Wonderment

Devotion and Compassion

When I practice yoga or meditation or spiritual singing or rolling meditation or dance prayer or contemplative prayer I am not retreating from the world. I am, instead, meeting life and the world through these practices. I may be shifting my attention either more towards what is distressing or more towards what is amazing and beautiful and wondrous or attending to oneness. I may even just be attentive to staying present to what is. Some folks may think of devotional or spiritual practices as escape hatches, portals into a different world of comfort and trust and love and well-being. I have certainly experienced inbreaking moments of awareness of all those things in my devotional and spiritual life. But far more often, I’m meeting what’s troubling and spending more time with those troubles until I’m no longer frightened by them or made less weary having to pay attention, and learning not too reflexively react with freezing, fighting, fainting, or fleeing. In other words, those practices help me have more choice in sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system responsiveness. Devotional and spiritual practices for me are not about focusing on some life after this one, or the threats of what may or may not happen after we die, or even about building up merit to improve a future life. For me, devotional and spiritual practices are ways for me to pursue the faithful promises I make and to help me stay present with all my heart and soul, mind and body with what is from a place of gentle curiosity, lovingkindness, compassion, and attentiveness. Some days are easier than others. 

 

Of course, I am not alone in devotional and spiritual practices as ways to help us navigate how we live right here and right now for right here and right now. And that is why, repeatedly, my most meaningful spiritual texts are very much of this world, grappling with the troubles we make and experience as well as the wonder, thanksgiving, and delight that hopefully can be part of each person’s life. And so we know, economic injustice is not a new thing to society. Repeatedly throughout the Bible economic injustice is named as something that affronts the Holy. These texts encourage us to some rather intense spiritual and devotional practices to attend to the issues of economic injustice, practices that we can see even in the texts were difficult and contested when first proposed, prophetically delivered, repeated, and written down. This week’s text speaks directly to Jubilee, the social reset based in thanksgiving and compassionate justice every seven years. Jubilee makes a whole year one of debt forgiveness, freedom, and restoration, drawing in more equity, dignity, compassion, and nurturing in our societies. If jubilee were practiced, it might prevent economic injustices from becoming endemic, entrenched, and multigenerational. Debts are to be forgiven. People in the equivalent of bankruptcy for the time (indentured servitude or indentured slavery) are to be set free. Fear falls. Folks rejoice and dance in thanksgiving. Poverty is eliminated or at least knocked back for a time as wealth is redistributed and the opportunities to create wealth are made available again to all. It is a wonderfully appealing vision, especially if you or people you love have ever been saddled with enormous debts, maybe for some life-saving medical procedure or maintenance medication or for a degree program that was necessary for a job that maybe is no longer even available or doesn’t pay as much as the program costs or lost a home due to economic recession or area economic redevelopment that left many without work.

 

And, almost immediately in Deuteronomy 15, we have the exceptions. I can imagine the wealthy who extended loans might have had a few things to say about forgiving those loans every seven years. "What’s to stop folks from running up debts and then the devoted person having to eat the loss?" "What is the limit of our sacrifice and devotion?" And, underneath those questions: "what is the limit on our compassion?" There’s the question for most of us, whatever our economic status: what is the limit on our compassion? For some of us that may be when we no longer can economically support the actions compassion asks of us. For some of us that may we be when we are frazzled and weary. What are the limits on your compassion? How do those limits change from hour to hour and day to day and year to year or situation to situation?

 

Compassion asks of us more than sympathy. Compassion asks us to address the suffering we bear witness to in our world, to show up and be present, and to do things like make sure everyone has a safe, decent place to live and clean water to drink and clean air to breathe and good food to eat and opportunities to live with dignity and purpose and support well-being. That is, compassion dances out of the care/nurture circuit in our mammalian brains. Compassion increases our sense of proximity to the folks who are experiencing suffering. "These people are my kin" can expand to “this community is my kin” or “this world is my kin". We can empathize. We can imagine ourselves in others' places, whether or not we have ever directly had the experiences these now-kin are having. 

 

But for each of us, there are limits in our capacity for compassion, variable as those limits probably are. We might not even be aware of those limits. We might only be aware that we are tired, or arguments about fairness become more compelling, or we find we are okay with turning away because of something else that seems more pressing, more important, or even calling more reasonable. For example, we might be aware of our internal limits of self-compassion, when our internal critical sense (sometimes called the critic) revs up and goes to town. In that time how easy it is to say to that critic, “yes, I know, there’s so much happening and yes, criticize away as much as you need” and feel compassion for our shame, guilt, and pain — for ourselves — that’s driving that harsh internal rant? Yet dialogue-based mindfulness practice encourages us to cultivate compassion by doing just that: welcoming all our feelings and bearing lovingkindness witness to them without necessarily acting on all those feelings. We may find we have some limits, maybe even some severe limits, on self-compassion. So let us not be surprised then when we meet stony-heartedness and exhaustion in society at large and in ourselves. The more suffering there is, the more stretched we are, the closer we come to meet or exceeding what we have for compassion - for ourselves, for this earth, for each other.

 

Reaching the edge of compassion we may tune out or demand what we call fairness or justice over compassion (when these are placed in opposition, that’s a nice flag to find out why these related concepts are being arrayed as mutually exclusive), or react in ways that when we’re feeling more full of love, thanksgiving, wonder and well-being we would never offer up. Reaching our limits can raise our senses of threat, of needing to activate the sympathetic nervous system for fighting, freezing, fainting, or fleeing. One of the reasons authoritarianism pushes people and communities to overload our senses of threat is so that we will be more likely to accept quick apparent answers, giving over responsibility and authority and agency. Meeting so much of that fear-mongering and threat-raising from powers seeking more power, division and hate is why I teach self-compassion and nurturing our capacities for resilience and compassion as part of justice-seeking, faithful risk, and devotion. We need ways, especiallywhen our senses of threat are enormous, to reconnect to a deep well of nurturing, wonder, thanksgiving, presence, lovingkindness and well-being. Or, in other terms, we need to stay juicy and vibrant so the firestorms of violence can’t catch in our bodies and communities.

 

So what about this spiritual practice of the jubilee? The Jubilee, it turns out, is very difficult to have people practice, especially people who have amassed wealth and, along with that, other people’s debts. Think, for a contemporary example, of all the mortgages currently held and what would happen if those were forgiven every 7 years - mortgages only extended in year 1, 6-year mortgages with incredibly high interest rates (no more 20 and 30-year loans), almost all properties in rentals to even more wealthy people since only the exceedingly wealthy could ever acquire property. Is that actually a more equitable society? Is that a society with greater economic justice and compassion and less poverty? 

 

And yet we know bad things happen. People have catastrophic illnesses or are attacked by brigands or suffer environmental disaster or war.  That is, as Deuteronomy 15:11 says, “For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land: which is why I command you to open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.” Please note the text doesn’t say, “For there will never cease to be irresponsible parasites seeking you out to suck you dry in your land.” No, there will be reasons for need and injustice that arises, and the devout person full of thanksgiving and wonder is asked to find their compassion. And so there has to be some system to inject some practical compassion or what you have is an institutionalization of poverty from one generation to the next and a widening and widening sense of who’s blessed and cursed and justifications to oppress those folks who are cursed. Debt forgiveness is a practice to keep us from getting too overloaded as a society in compassion fatigue: there’s a built-in way of restoration and reduction of social distances. In contemporary life we have bankruptcy law. We could also have jubilee years or practices, such as a jubilee year to get migrants who are peaceful folk the documents to allow them to officially stay, rather than persecuting and deporting and frightening people and separating and incarcerating parents and children, recognizing that economic necessity (often from climate change, war, or economic failure) is one of the largest reasons for migration. (These migration paperwork amnesties have happened before and been very successful and peaceful.) In September, there will be a week-long Global Climate Strike (https://globalclimatestrike.net) to bring our attention to the realities of climate change and the tremendous social disruption that is already happening and will worsen if we don’t attend to the facts of human-caused climate change. What would jubilee look like today in relationship to student debts, to migration caused by climate change and war, to entrenched patterns and policies of racism and gendered violence? How do we practice compassionate justice recognizing this whole world as kin?

 

Practicing compassion we need to dip into the well of thanksgiving, love, and wonder. We cannot be too thirsty and dry, too pressed and brittle, because our caring system will first demand care for ourselves and those immediately around us, necessary to our survival. There are many practices to harmonize, calm, and nurture these connections and connecting senses, from cultivating community gardens or building homes together to singing and dancing together. Sharing food is a fairly easy and common way to start to ease the stony-heartedness and relax into feeling cared for and caring. Joining the climate strike and meeting others in your area who care about the same issues and are committed to change can be energizing and empowering. Committing to sit weekly with the residents of a half-way house transitioning from incarceration to freedom or from substance abuse treatment into the wider world can be another way to nurture wonder, joy, thanksgiving, and well-being together, and, together, this compassion we need. As we widen the networks of connection and deepen our capacities for compassion, more and more of the world becomes the kin we care for and about and cherish so deeply and thankfully, we cannot consider stony-heartedness - a form of freezing or fleeing -- a reasonable option.

 

What happens when our devotion to the Holy begins with nurturing compassion for one another, for this earth, and for ourselves? How does that change what policies, practices and laws we support and seek? How does compassion challenge and change us? What faithful risks will you take to nurture compassion this week?

 

Faithfulness Needs Vulnerability

In the United States and elsewhere in the world, there is a stony-hearted, stiff-necked and unkind view of the many facing oppression, suppression, and deportation that these migrant peoples, including children and infants, are deserving whatever the government is dishing out (no matter how that violates human rights or basic decency). And yet, immigration policy need not be so harsh, and could support peaceful ways to assist people needing to relocate. People can be treated with dignity and still offered pathways of asylum and migration for other means. How different would these policies and practices be if every time government agents, politicians, and some media saw these folks, they could bear witness to the strengths, courage, and gifts and the multitude of good reasons folks are making to seek peaceful migration? Here is one truth: if we make official migration extremely difficult and more violent when people are fleeing extreme violence and climate change for relative safety, then more pressure will come to bear on unofficial migration pathways. Repressive measures do not alleviate, remove, or solve the reasons people are fleeing. All repression does is increase the amount of fear and anxiety among the whole population, whether people are migrants or not, as authoritarianism extends itself.  But authoritarianism loves the prosperity gospel as a cloak, this ideal of meritocracy as justification and cover for the repression authoritarianism exerts. Authoritarianism then claims “these people deserve this suffering,” and in fearfulness and pride and the desire not to be associated or lumped with people deserving suffering, others may harden their hearts and turn away from cruelties and violence, failing to uphold even the Golden Rule of offering to others what they themselves would appreciate receiving. Why? Because in the language of justification by merit, folks can hide from themselves, feeling assured that if they are not being punished or suppressed, it is because somehow they belong to the deserving. That’s how racism and other forms of oppression work to divide people from one another: I may not have much, but I’m better and more deserving than that awful non-person over there. That sense of virtue isn’t rooted in truth, but in delusion meant to control and divide, and results in tremendous suffering and the deaths of very innocent people doing what any of us (yes, any of us) might do in similar circumstances.

 

As we read our sacred texts, seeking truth and faithful practices, we need to watch for the texts of justifying stony-heartedness and a false sense of virtue. The first segment of this week’s teachings from Deuteronomy (7:12-9) reiterates standard contractual language from other Ancient Near Eastern religions from around the same era: there are virtues to be pursued and signs of failure will show up with curses, poverty, conquered governments, and ill health while signs of success will be evidenced by blessings, wealth, strong government, and good health. That is what has become called the prosperity gospel in a nut shell. Yes, there is Biblical text for that theological viewpoint, but to support it, one must override all the (multitude of) texts that are alongside, the ones calling people to humility, to an idea of the Holy as one who can’t be bribed and who cares for the oppressed, vulnerable, and suffering. That is what we have in the rest of this week’s text, from Deuteronomy 9-11:25. With Moses speaking directly in these later words, these more challenging and difficult words to live into, that is where the spiritual weight of the argument dwells.

 

There is, of course, good reason for this offered revision to the Ancient Near Eastern contract model of faithfulness if we consider what scholars believe, tracing much of Deuteronomy to being laid down and edited during the Babylonian Exile. An exiled people in the contract model are exiled not only from their land but from their deities, as their deities have been conquered by the new rulers. Resisting that, holding onto culture, beliefs and practices means needing to shift away from the old contract model that is delivered within a person’s lifetime to assurances that the Holy is still with the people and indeed cares for them in their oppressed and abject states and the idea that eventually things will change and their children or children’s children or children’s children’s children will make it home. That is: we resist not just for the now or for ourselves, but as caretakers of the future. Our vulnerability is also our strength and places us strongly in the peoples that the Holy loves. We resist oppression faithfully not just because it is wrong in the now or because we seek freedom and redress, but because this resistance alongside the Holy is part of how the Holy cares for the vulnerable. And when things do get better, we are encouraged to hold onto our humility and not give into the tempting interpretation that permits so much oppression to thrive that somehow we are deserving and those folks over there are not. “Know, then, that it is not for any virtue of yours that the Lord Your God is giving you this good land to possess; for you are a stiff-necked people.” 

 

Our virtues neither bless nor protect us nor mark us as deserving any more than our failings mark us as undeserving. We may still require or benefit from encouragement to care for others, to keep our hearts soft and welcoming, to love the stranger as we love the Holy, to tend this life with reverence and wonder and curiosity and courage. After all, these practices all challenge us when we are frightened, angry or grieving or have any worldly power or well-being to risk, to put ourselves in danger, even possibly to change. When we are tempted to trade a false sense of security or a little more power at the expense of someone else who also is seeking to live a life of love, peace, justice, and well-being, these practices call us back to a better self than is easy and a more just and equitable community than is present. To be clear how undeserving the people are of any blessings, Deuteronomy offers a nice long list list of how stiff-necked the people are and Moses’ interventions ending with God affirming the covenant and giving Moses the ten commandments. Concluding in 10:12: “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in God’s paths, to love God, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.” And just in case we feel a little like defending our relationship with God exclusively, 10:17-19: “For the Lord your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing them with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” 

 

That is, faith is more than a simple contract that if I live justly, then I will never be ill and will have all the things I ever need. Faith begins in vulnerability, in exile from power, in not having enough ness, in the dignity of enduring oppression, in the middle of the long trouble, in recognizing just how weak we are and interdependent upon this web of being, one another, and this planet’s good health. Faithfulness asks us to risk loving and caring as God loves and cares: upholding the cause of the fatherless and the widow and befriending the stranger (in other words: protecting the vulnerable and practicing compassion). This might not seem so radical until you stop, review earlier, and remember just how few of the practices outlined in the ten basic commandments and in so many other areas bother to relate to people not in power or with some measure of wealth and well-being.  In the middle of a text that is also telling currently disempowered people that they will someday have more power in the land over those that currently outnumber them and control the resources and livelihoods, the call to faithful practice beyond prosperity reminds folks that (1) God loves the vulnerable and doesn’t accept bribes from the powerful, so the disempowered are still part of the chosen and (2) encourages those who do have resources and maybe some power to be careful not to become full of themselves as though they somehow deserve either resources or power. What is being brought forward is a challenging faithfulness, where the people who are not advantaged by the status quo are just as and maybe more cherished, more loved, and, in the end, more important than those who have wealth, health, prestige and worldly power. Theologies supporting authoritarianism only encourage more stony-heartedness and stiff-neckedness as fear and terror rise. Faithfulness calls us in a different direction, toward embracing our vulnerabilities and aiding those who are even more vulnerable than ourselves, not only for justice and well-being right now, but to support and cultivate a future in which all of us might thrive and would, minimally with that Golden Rule mindset, want to live. Faithfulness needs vulnerability, lest we succumb to the temptation of grabbing power and holding it over others, lest we fail to remember our own vulnerabilities and those of our ancestors, lest we give authoritarianism the power for cruelty, hatred, and division that it craves.

 

How are we befriending the stranger and cultivating a world today reflecting the Holy who shows no favor and takes no bribe but protects the vulnerable and cares for all? Are we demanding that the vulnerable enjoy respect and the conditions for well-being? Are we insisting that it is wrong incarcerating children without due process, adequate medical care, food, emotional and spiritual support, and their families who did not hurt but who tried to love and protect them? How are we showing up, vulnerable, lives on the line for this planet, this life, and one another?

 

Resisting Tyranny, Finding Blessings

Holding onto your culture and beliefs can be a challenging thing when that culture and those beliefs do not reflect what is expedient, what is remunerative, and what is safe under a particular government. Written in part to and for the exiles in Babylon, this week’s passage from Deuteronomy encourages the Israelites to remember and uphold their teachings and traditions. At a time when who was in power reflected the strength of that nation’s gods (a belief that isn’t too hard to scratch up today), the idea that a god of a defeated and exiled people is still powerful and has teachings and traditions to follow, that there’s still an operational covenant here, is very much against the dominant culture’s opinion and practices. “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children..” (Deut. 4:9b-10a) These words are reminders of how powerful the memories we cultivate can be. How we remember matters. That we remember matters. That we share these memories, these faithful promises, matters. 

 

We don’t have to seek very far for evidence of memory as a powerful counter-dominant-cultural force. People who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or genocide of First Nations peoples, or the atrocities of chattel slavery are, unfortunately, quite vocal and good at utilizing social media to spread mistrust and cultivate “alternative facts” (lies) to create different appreciations of history and discount truth and truthful traditions and memories. Attacking the trustworthiness and memory is a common discrediting tactic, whether we are talking about someone sharing experiences of sexual or racial violence or something as simple as a person denying responsibility for something they did in fact do. As Timothy Snyder observes in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: "Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” Controlling how and what we remember is part of how authoritarianism works in controlling and changing the populations they govern. Part of that control is activating three of our seven primary affective neural circuits (as described by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, The Archeology of the Mind): the fear, anger, and grief circuits. Panksepp also finds all mammals have care, play, seeking and wanting (what he calls lust) circuits, giving us a shared 7 affective circuits that change our bodies and our brains, depending on how we activate and move those energies. When fear, anger, and grief are primarily activated, we tend to be less able to think imaginatively, to be less curious and able to feel wonder, and struggle to practice caring (love, compassion, forgiveness, nurturing, thankfulness, generosity) or to play.

 

Among the exhortations to remember our faithful promises and covenant with the Holy is a reminder that despite all the evidence to the contrary (exile, for example, or in today’s environment, rising hate crimes and climate change) that the Holy is compassionate and caring (Deut. 4:29-31). In other words: remember the Holy and activate those other circuits (care, play, seeking wonder and thanksgiving, wanting goodness for our neighbors and strangers as for ourselves) that we need to counteract the freezing, fleeing, fighting, and fainting that can dominate us when fear, anger and grief are primarily aroused. When we’re living with so much activation of our fear, grief, and anger circuits, it is easy to find those experiences directing so much of the meaning we are making in our lives. It takes work in the middle of troubling times to activate the care and play circuits and to orient our seeking and wanting circuits to seeking out wonder and wanting goodness for all. And for most of our lives, there will be troubling times. There will be people seeking to abuse power. There will be losses of those we love and of our own abilities. There will be changes in our environment and threats to how we would like to live. And yet…there are also goodnesses, mercies, blessings, even if that’s something as simple as shade on a hot day, or a song that lifts our hearts, or a stranger meeting our eyes and giving us a warm nod that lets us know we are not yet abandoned to the violence that is around us. 

 

Remembering our faithful promises, even as we struggle with grief and anger and fear, even as violence spreads and affects us and those we love, even as we bear witness to more and more suffering, calls us back to the freshness in every moment and every day of what it is to have faith. “It was not with our fathers that this Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today” (Deut.5:3). Repeating that promise as living right now with us the living empowers us to hold fast, to turn away from the lures of expediency and from the way fear and terror can be manipulated to have us give our obedience to worldly authorities that will not, in fact, make us any safer, no matter what they promise from the midst of fear. As the laws and traditions are summarized, we are reminded that there are a multitude of ways to demonstrate our freedom and our faithfulness even when we live in proscribed circumstances, such as not bearing false witness against our neighbors and not stealing (Deut.6:17). From an untested perspective, these might seem like small promises, but in a culture when bearing false witness might mean trading your survival for someone else’s, the stakes are high indeed.

 

Resisting tyranny and the spread of hate and violence is part of our spiritual and heart inheritance. Yes, we human beings can suffer enough fear, anger, and grief, enough trauma, to react unthinkingly and as a mob or as individuals and commit terrible acts. And yes, we human beings can also choose to cultivate the care and play circuits, and shift the energies in our seeking and wanting circuits toward what can reduce fear, anger, and grief for all, to what eases suffering and brings forward blessings, thanksgiving, connection, resilient and compassionate community, awe and wonder for the sacred, and the freedoms of choosing love, justice, equity, and well-being for all. The way probably won’t be easy, but what is worthy so rarely is easy. And we will probably be called to change, to learn how to calm our bodies and minds amid terrifying times, to learn how to work even better together to meet tyranny and hate and find a different way forward, to learn how to cultivate diverse communities that attend to and value all their members. How do we wish to be remembered? As the people who firmly faced down tyranny and hate? or as the people who quietly wish to sweep their compliance with tyranny and hate under the rug of denial? As the people who permitted their neighbors’ families to be torn apart and children not to be provided services or for basic rights to be denied? Or as the people who insisted that everyone, no exceptions, is offered rights and decency and compassion? Will we be the people who remember the painful truths of history as well as the sweet ones? Will we be the people who create a legacy for the future that offers dignity and truth?