The Wonderment

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?

 

Living the Story

Human beings are storytellers. Part of the philosophical tradition that informs yoga, and is particularly a feature of Kripalu Yoga, the practice I study, is this question of tat and sat, trying to attend to what is true and real. What are the stories we tell? How true and real are they? What kinds of suffering arise when we act as though something is true and real but it is not?  I could, for example, tell myself the story that I can practice yoga like I did in my twenties, a story which can lead to great unhappiness as I live with both more arthritis and neurological disease that I didn’t have in as great a degree as then. Or, I could tell myself the story that I can’t practice yoga at all because my sense of balance is erratic at best, and then have unhappiness in my body from muscles that could be used and are not and fascia that isn’t gliding and stretching as it evolved to do and grows stickier and stiffer. Both stories can create suffering. What seems most true and real at this moment is that I can practice yoga asana, pranayama (breath practices), ethics (yamas and niyamas), one-pointed concentration and meditation, and that these will look and feel differently than how I practiced decades ago, just as one day differs from another.

 

As I try to understand how stories shape my life, I find it helpful to ask what a story serves. Perhaps that story was once protective or encouraging. Perhaps that story was always harmful but I accepted it for what seemed good reasons at the time. Perhaps the story needs a little reshaping, reframing, and adapting to serve the now. A great deal of literary and religious scholarship examines how we reshape, reframe, and adapt stories to changes in our world. Floods resculpt the world from what it was to a new shape: the stories of flood narratives follow. The world dries and develops a new form, river ways and floodplains becoming deserts: the flood narratives change, becoming more metaphorical or allegorical. 

 

This week, we reach the Book of Deuteronomy, which begins by retelling the story of the Israelites. Why is there this need to retell the story in a different way? Consider what the Babylonian exile does to the story of the Holy granting a homeland forever. For a people in exile, the story needs to change, to one of continued promise and to being remembered, and, also, to the idea that home is possible in some future generation. Scholars reading Deuteronomy observe that the story seems reframed and retold for folks surviving in exile and in other places authorizes Josiah’s religious reforms, dating the reform sections to about the 7th century BCE and the historical narrative section to the time of the Babylonian exile. In other words, baked into the Torah are multiple tellings, frames, and views of the same story, reflecting our need to adapt our stories depending on what we are facing. (Indeed, this is a feature of the Bible, and why I don’t teach or study the Bible as a single unified book but as a library of texts, some of which agree and some of which conflict, and that includes Christian Scriptures and well as the Hebrew Bible.) Part of how we define ourselves is through the stories we tell. For example, when one tells the story “make America great again” there is an appeal to some golden age that never was except, maybe, for a few wealthy white guys. When we tell the history of exclusion and slavery and lack of rights, and the long, often bloody fights to be more diverse and more inclusive, we are addressing another history with different moral centers. Ancient historiography doesn’t bother to tend to the social location of the authors or expected readers/listeners; that tends to be something we have to study and assess and poke away at for ourselves. So we want to read for the differences.

 

This week’s reading (Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22) begins with retelling the story of the passage away from Mount Horeb (or Sinai, or Pisgah) toward what will become the people’s lands that they seize from others already there. Interestingly, the Holy seems to kick the people off the mountain for staying overly long, like that sacred mountain was going to be their homeland and they weren’t going further to another promised land. Moses speaks of how leadership was assigned and leadership’s duties (omitting the whole story of his father-in-law’s involvement that we have heard before), and then the travels from one inhabited land (not wilderness) to another. There’s still the rebellion, the sulking, and the punishments of those who rebelled and sulked still are not to make it to the promised land. That’s when the people turn and march off into the wilderness. The wilderness is spoken of directly as a seasoning ground, a place of punishment, a distance from doing what the people so badly want, creating home. For a people in exile, that story gives meaning to current suffering. We don’t need to literally be exiled; many of us today feel alienated, frightened by, or in danger where we are living. Approaching this time as a seasoning ground, a place of growth and testing and change preparing for the future can give us needed direction, meaning and purpose. Later, when the people are really truly ready, they march through and conquer one land after another. Some of that readiness is as a military unit, ready to lead and follow. Some of that readiness may be in trusting the Holy. Deuteronomy has Moses summarize the story just before the people are to head off to battle with Joshua to finally claim their land.  But the many, many other themes of becoming a free people are missing from this retelling. What can be justified from this remembering of the story of seeking home? What can encourage us if we’re feeling alienated, frightened by or in danger of where we live right now?

 

A people once without a homeland might fight to gain a homeland. What takes a much longer time to tell in other versions is condensed. What Numbers spends story after story telling us of how people mumble and rebel and yearn for the fleshpots of Egypt is swept up into a few more succinct chapters. If this was written for those in the Babylonian Exile, it is a reminder right from Moses’s lips: you are not forsaken or forgotten and you will be called again to a place you can know is your home; the covenant is not broken for this is how we once lived as we sought to find our place in the world. That’s a powerful promise and a powerful covenant in a time when most folks thought gods were supremely local and/or defeated by invading armies and their gods. It is still a motivating story if we feel displaced, dispossessed, in exile and still trying to live faithfully. On the sacred mountain, out in the wilderness, trekking through hostile lands, we are still in covenant with the Holy and still the Holy’s people. Unlike Leviticus and Numbers, Deuteronomy is less about the making of a free people than the ways of being a people in exile and a people embracing Josiah’s religious reforms. 

 

After a week with more mass shootings driven by toxic stories, stories generating more suffering, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can add to trouble. After a week with many tending the wounded, planting and caring for the land, working for greater equity and kindness, offering one another help to their cancer treatment or to have food on the table, and giving generously to bring more hope and compassion to bear in community after community, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can increase care, play, compassion, hope, and love. But we do have to choose which stories serve the world we want to live in. Personally, I prefer the world with increasing care, play, compassion, hope, and love. That is a world directly answering those stories generating more suffering, more fear, more rage, and more hopelessness with alternatives that nurture life and well-being for all. Choosing that, day after day, decision by decision, can be difficult. But for me, easing suffering and finding more joy and hope for all is a good story.

 

So take some time this week and reflect on the stories you tell of your people, your communities, your homes, your belonging, your covenants, your faithful promises. How have those changed over time and in differing circumstances? How has the story’s fundamentals remained but the interpretation and the emphases changed? We human beings are storytellers and meaning makers. How do we shape and how are we shaped by the stories we tell and live? How easily do we reach to justify violence when we are afraid or angry? How easily do we reach for compassion when we are suffering? How might we feel caught in a story that doesn’t help us survive right now? How might other people’s stories be affecting us, adding to suffering, drawing us toward actions we might otherwise never consider? 

 

Vows

There are times in a devout person’s life where we will want to make vows. We might take on a practice of abstaining from something we enjoy as an offering. We might vow to undertake prayer five times a day for a certain period of time. We might take a vow of enoughness, choosing not to acquire more wealth than we need for day to day living and giving anything extra away. We may take marital vows, of how we wish to treat the one we are marrying and how they shall be with us. We may take vows of celibacy, to devote all our energy in service to the greater good or in devotion to the sacred. A vow is a faithful promise that we are going to fulfill. So when Unitarian Universalists covenant (are bound in a faithful promise) to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, that’s a vow that requires daily efforts to fulfill. Exactly how we end up promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person may present differently depending on our life circumstances, gifts, and abilities. And there will be, as I have said many times before, people we would like very much not to affirm their inherent worth and dignity, our personal exceptions list. Except vows rarely come with clauses of exemption or exception. 

 

Vows are challenging precisely because they ask more of us than is easy, routine or habitual. Vows can help us change spiritually, emotionally, physically and mentally as we pursue fulfilling these faithful promises. When we vow to nurture equity, compassion and justice, we approach life very differently than when we may be comfortably supported by inequities, or when we would rather be stony-hearted toward someone, or when justice seems rather more difficult than  accepting the status quo. This vow challenges us to change so we experience, perceive, and live life differently than before we made this faithful promise.

 

 

Vows in ancient times and even now often have a component of sacrifice in hopes of achieving some blessing. We might think about the last time something awful happened and we found ourselves spontaneously promising the Holy if only our loved one would be okay or if we can find a way through some seemingly impossible situation. When my father was struck by a vehicle moving at considerable speed, I know I was praying the entire way to the hospital that he would survive and be all right. Bargaining is, in contemporary faith development theory, viewed as something that we do if we have a less mature faith. If we’re praying “Lord, I’ll give up snacks for a month if my team can just win” then yes, that may be so. But prayers and promises of intercession out of compassion and for love and justice are not reflective of an immature faith. And the kinds of vows we might take, for example, in hopes our family will be blessed with children, or our communities might thrive after major employers pull out of the area are not. They reflect the real truths of our lives, where we are suffering, where our communities are suffering, where our world is suffering, and our attempts to seek to mitigate that suffering without adding to anyone else’s pain. Whether our vows are sacred promises to each other witnessed by the Holy, or holy promises to the One to seek a blessing, or faithful promises to see change in ourselves and our world at large, these promises matter.

 

And that is why I struggle with this week’s passage from Numbers (30:2-36:13). Not only is there a huge theological justification for violence in the second part of the passage, but the first part speaks about how women’s faithful promises can only be fulfilled if her father or her husband approves. Why? Well, when this passage was set forward, women most frequently had to have the protection of men and had the status of dependents. Independent women, such as widowed or divorced women, or Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah (a/k/a Zelophephad’s daughters, known by their father, not their mother) are recognized as separate people whose vows are of equal weight to any man’s. This issue of dependent or independent women’s vows was of some concern in the ancient days, because as Adele Berlin notes in the Jewish Study Bible (2nd Edition) “The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, placed almost equal weight on the oaths of adult females and limited a husband’s or father’s right of annulment to oaths and vows which transgress the laws of the Torah.” (note on verses 30:4-13). Today, adult daughters living with their parents and wives are not necessarily dependents, but active independent agents in their lives, regardless of their financial independence or dependence. As long as the faithful promise isn’t committing resources that aren’t ours to commit to fulfilling it, the vows are freely given and thoughtfully made, I believe that each person’s vows matter. 

 

Sometimes, though, we can’t be faithful people and keep the vows we have made. Vows, for example, made in a relationship that becomes abusive, should be nullified. Or our circumstances change and to keep those vows is to injure ourselves or another or require stealing from ourselves or another. Some folks, for example, are encouraged to take vows of chastity because of their sexual orientation. This is a vow of injury to one’s self if done for reasons other than freely choosing to give their primary relational focus energy to the sacred. I want to note that plenty of faithful people manage to live into their sacred callings without needing a promise of chastity. For it to meaningful, that faithful promise needs to be freely given. Vows thoughtfully made are intensely personal and weighty spiritual practices. How we promise does indeed matter and each of us needs to be free to make faithful promises as part of our spiritual lives and practices if we so choose. 

 

What are the vows you have made? What vows have challenged you to change? And what vows turned out to be vows that couldn’t be faithfully kept? How do your faithful promises affect your relationships with this Earth, one another, yourself, and the Holy?