It was a wonderful two days (Friday and Saturday) that I want to write more about soon…and will, once our dear friends, who arrive in a couple of hours (that will be filled with sweeping and mopping and laundry and food prep on my end) head back home.  Much more later…

Last night N and I watched Syriana.  Syriana tells the story of Big Oil and Big America working in front of and behind the scenes to make sure America’s oil interests get met exceeded.  It humanizes the many people involved and caught up in this work, including unemployed Pakistani oil workers, CIA operatives, lawyers, business owners, consultants, kings and princes both sympathetic and opposed to America’s hopes for oil in Kazakhstan.

As often happens after movies such as these, I feel a lot of dissonance inside.  I’m troubled, to put it mildly, by the ways that people and entire countries get objectified as companies and countries pursue short-term prosperity (defined fiscally).  I’m equally troubled by the fact that there are no bad guys to pin this on when you look up close, no people that aren’t human like you or me, caught up in systems far bigger than themselves, histories they didn’t choose, but have been socialized within, indoctrinated by.  Put me in a family with history in oil, and I may just care more about my dynasty than the people I have to kill (literally or otherwise) to maintain it.  Who knows?

So I roil inside with indignation that can’t find a home.  I roil with the helplessness I feel when I read about Iraq and Beirut and kidnappings and religious conflicts.  When people blindly support one side or another in such things, one side or another when it comes to politics or war.

What can I do but try to listen to my anger?  Try to listen to whether it’s inviting me to do something different with my days, or inviting me to do what I’m already doing with that much more oomph.  Anger is fuel, I’m thinking, that can take us down many roads.  If it can take me further down my road of bearing light in inner places–a world-changing endeavor just like politics or organizing or war–then bring it on, I guess I say.  It feels terrible, a scribbly sharpness inside, but maybe that’s okay.  Maybe I need it to fuel my acts into ones more alive, more full of courage and the kind of hope that comes from acting in response to what I don’t like (and what I do!), even if my acts address the yuck in a round-about way.

Can writing my novel, my stories, my essays, my blog, raising my baby, loving family and friends, tending my soul–can these make the world more sane?  Can they change foreign policy?  Can they have anything at all to do with who needs and gets oil, how much, and at what human or monetary cost?

If any of you will be attending the Blogher conference at the end of this month (yes, I am spoiled; it’s 20 minutes from where I live), I’d love to get a chance to meet you!  I’ll be there both days.  Email me if you want to find a way to connect!

On a day of conflicted thoughts about being American, conflicted feelings about freedom (whose? and at what cost?), my thoughts turn back to another highway experience, different from the kind I wrote about yesterday.

It was three or four years ago.  I was tuling along in my car–70?, maybe 75mph–on a patch of semi-full road.  A motorcycle cop passes me on the right, and cuts a diagonal swath across all four lanes.  All of us slow down, wondering which of us he’s caught.  But then he cuts his swath again the other way, slowing his own self down.  The cars ahead of him race on as he gets his speed, and consequently ours, down to something like 30.  We quickly realize he’s herding us, keeping the whole pack of us behind him with his slow, graceful turnings.  B–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h, b–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h.

And up ahead, on the now-empty stretch, I see chunks of furniture, splintered from a fall.  A second cop is working fast to get them off the lanes and onto the shoulder.  We’re only 20 or 30 yards off when he clears the last piece, and he and the cop on the bike salute each other as the cop on the bike speeds off toward the sun.

I cried.  Seriously.  It was that beautiful.  That perfectly orchestrated.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wanting to clap.  Catastrophic danger and silent, graceful protection overlapped on that stretch of burning asphalt, and other than those of us at the front of the pack, no one even knew.  I’m sure some were even peeved by the slowing speeds.  We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t even know we needed it, but help was there, at work.

I often think of that scene when the trajectory of things as big as history, as big as institutions, big as wars or countries or administrations therein–things I feel so small and helpless in the face of–look headed for (or seem smack in the middle of…) disaster.  I think of that scene and hope, deep in my most earnest places, that there are people and powers more seeing, more knowing, more capable than any of us alone can be, to help navigate the dangers that most of us can’t recognize.  I want to join in their work, too, and sing blessings along the way, more expansive than God Bless America, more generous than America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.  I want to help imagine and live into existence a world, rather than only a country, or subset within, that is land of the free–truly–and home of the brave.

Lately I’ve been so inspired by artists–people putting sounds and words and images and action to the things we feel and know and want to know.  Sometimes things we don’t want to know.  Bobby posted a link to a really amazing performance of Pink’s "Dear Mr. President," and I cried much of the way through.  Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten makes me cry, too–tears that are all about hope and joy and a deep, deep yearning.  Watch a video here.  Or just read the lyrics.

And there’s this artist, in Columbia, making guitar’s out of guns, instruments of destruction into instruments of peace and construction.  "Violence fears love because it is stronger," he says in the interview.  "Violence fears my voice because it goes beyond death."  Gah!  So beautiful.

I could list hundreds and hundreds more.  And these are musicians, but what about painters, sculptors, writers, poets–the host of souls doing the frivolous work of prophecy?  The "not-a-real-job" of waking us up, lifting us up, agitating us toward action? 

Who can say art is an extra in this life, an added film of icing on all the real stuff?  I say art is essential.  Like the heart that keeps our blood alive.

here

Last night we bundled Elijah up and headed downtown for the Holiday Stroll.  This is an event where shops are open later than usual and food booths dot street corners and musicians of all kinds fill nooks and plazas.  Lots of strollers and men with babies wriggling in front packs and lovers and friends of all ages on up through retirement.

Highlights:

Roasted chestnuts!  We waited in line at the only booth we could find while costumed vendors checked and rechecked and shuffled piles of them roasting on portable barbeques.  Every once in a while an older lady with a couple of teeth missing I think, and who was also costumed, and tending to a young child that might have belonged to the checkers and shufflers, burst into chorus, singing, loudly, the first lines of a carol before bending over the child again and forgetting to finish.  Occasionally her bursts were something about “CHESTNUTS, HERE!” and those of us in the queue looked at her and each other, and laughed good-naturedly.  The chestnuts didn’t taste very good, but I can now say I’ve had some, and actually know what all those songs of them are talking about.  It’s the idea, right?

Our friends seeing us from their car, slowing, and shouting repeatedly from their windows, “WHAT A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY!”, to our initial confusion (we didn’t at first recognize them) and a very near collision with the car in front of them.

Lowlight: 

A sample from a booth, offered by a gentleman with a thick French accent and an urgency to get us to buy something from him, which tasted like a very smooth, very potent form of creamed liver.  On toast.  Could be our tastes aren’t refined enough to appreciate this delicacy, but it was so terribly strong, and really so awful, that once we smiled and nodded our way away from him, N asked if I felt like I needed to throw up too.  “Tastes like I already have,” I said back.  We wandered on, looking for a mouthwash booth, or turpentine or something—anything to cut the liver.

How are you getting into the season?

So I’m thinking about Christmas this week. 

When I was a child it seemed like it didn’t start until after Thanksgiving.  This year Christmas displays were up after Halloween.  I love celebrating things, finding excuses to do things special, but I have to admit I resent all this yuletide splatter.  It feels forced on me by people who want to sell me stuff.  “YOU MUST CELEBRATE!” everything pulses.  “YOU MUST BUY BAGS OF HERSHEY KISSES, HOLIDAY POPCORN, COOKIES FOR DIPPING IN TEA.  YOU MUST GET RED AND GREEN SERVING PLATTERS AND HEARTH-WARMING WREATHS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PRESENTS.  LOADS OF PRESENTS!  FOR EVERYONE!!!”

I leave stores feeling assaulted.

So the weird thing is yesterday while running errands, all that stuff initially brought a wave of nostalgia.  Memories came flooding in of the childhood rituals that made Christmas magic for me, and smell so much like heaven:  stringing popcorn for the Christmas tree, clipping greenery to dress the staircase, making peppernuts (a German-Mennonite Christmas cookie) and listening to the Messiah (…or Amy Grant’s first Christmas album).  Traveling to my aunt and uncle’s place to bide the endless hours it took for morning to come and breakfast to get eaten and one of the gospel Christmas stories read before gifts could get opened.  It was magic.  So full of familiar.  So full of things I could count on.

But my nostalgia quickly turned to bewilderment.  I’m all grown up now.  The traditions of my childhood have mostly disappeared.  It’s up to me to try to turn my nostalgia into new traditions, new ways of making the season holy. But here’s the rub:  apart from that initial reminiscence, when I’m out on the streets and in stores, I mostly feel rebellious, bucking at Lord Consumerism.  "Stuff” is hardly what I want to pour celebratory resources into—monetary or otherwise.  My mind turns to Jesus, and for just that second I wonder how to celebrate this wondrous hero, this embodiment of what I most admire, when in the very next breath I’m bucking all over again, and this time at the Church.  Something about making of Christ an idol, making from his life cathedrals and choirs and committees commissioned to legislate goodness, making industries of music and books and tapes and training institutions that say, in Christ’s name, who’s in and out and on God’s side, making all the glitz and glitter of Advent a larger than life affair—something about all of that feels too much like what I see at the mall.  Too much like a good idea blown way, way out of proportion, turned into something far from its seed.  If blessing those we love with gifts can be turned into assault, I guess the commemoration of Jesus can too—this man who stood in solidarity with underdogs and challenged most things rich, most things religious, most things institutional and people sure they had God figured out.  This guy who refused royal treatment and was shy to be named or lauded too loudly.  Is there not irony in this?  Irony in the accounts we have of him, juxtaposed with the ways we think to honor him?

I want this Advent season to have magic.  I want to not take myself or our crazy culture too seriously.  I want to be like a duck, and that pulse to buy and to idolize Jesus like water, forming a pond for me to play in without getting wet, rich mud-banks to mine for grubs.  I want to not mistake that pulse for nourishment, and neither its flip-side, righteous indignation.  I want to take the irony of an anti-Christ Christmas—religious or not—and laugh at it, even as I go about trying to honor the season and the man with the values I hold, the company I keep, the stories I tell.  I guess if I’m able to do all of that, I’ll be seeing all the magic I could wish for.

So I’ve been sitting (read: nursing, burping, bouncing, bathing, changing, cooing, getting peed upon) with the question I asked myself in the last post – the question about whether there’s something I’m wanting to do that maybe I’m not doing because I’m afraid of getting dirty.  And I’ve come up with something.  But I don’t want to write about that yet.

I want to write about a question that helped me get there. 

Why try to do good in the world?  That’s it.  Why try to do good?  Simple enough, right?  Riiight…

I know this can be answered a hundred different ways, but as I’ve pondered some of them, I’ve realized I don’t like a lot of what’s available.

Guilt, for instance.  I know it can be a good catalyst in certain situations.  It isn’t all bad.  But to me it seems life-sucking as a primary motivator.  I think it poisons good with a kind of self-centeredness, an objectification of the people or environments in which the good is done.  Such things become tools, merely, for making the gooder (person doing good) feel better. 

I don’t know how to get completely away from guilt.  My life is privileged, so far as race and family and finances and education and a body that works well are concerned, and I’m well aware that there are lots of the opposites everywhere.  I didn’t ask for what I’ve got, and I’m pretty sure others didn’t either, and yet here we are.  Disparities galore. 

But here’s the rub: Maybe it’s this very thing – this very fact that no one asked for what they’ve got – that makes guilt not make much sense.  You think?

All of life’s disparities could lead to a kind of ethical motivation for doing good, then, I suppose:  good is just the right thing to do.  I, for example, am capable of doing good.  I’ve got a nice bundle of resources to work with (the privilege I talked about).  And let’s face it:  good is needed.  Everywhere.  Why not do it?

Something about this moves too much in the direction of guilt for my liking, though.  At least for now, as I continue detoxifying from the stuff.  It introduces obligation.  And not just obligation, but obligation with a ball and chain attached to it, shaped conspicuously much like an uptight judge.  He waits vigilantly for you to squander your life or talents or money or time, and even when he isn’t officially on your case for something, it feels like he is.  Because the “good” you do is always getting held up next to the million “bad” or selfish things you sometimes (regularly?) do instead.

No, “it’s the right thing to do” isn’t invitational or inspiring or soul-expanding at all for me.  It makes my soul shrink.  And my courage, too.

So I’ve thought a lot about the interconnectedness slant for doing good.  About how doing good for others is really a way of doing good for myself.  And for everyone.  Eastern thought has a lot of great things to say about this.  And physics, too.  And I’m filled with wonder as I consider how true it is, and how magical.  And how it makes me more patient and compassionate where I might not otherwise be.

But I have to admit that, here too, the idea falls flat for me.  Maybe if I spent more time meditating, and got myself more viscerally in touch with my connectedness with everything and everyone, I’d be spontaneously inspired toward positive action.  But until that happens, the idea gets stuck in the logical, unfeeling parts of myself, and doesn’t have the soulful steam of feeling to make my self go anywhere.  As interconnected with everything as I believe myself to be, I just don’t live in awareness of that very often, and the guy begging on the corner and the tree in the next complex over and the dog that yipped at my heals this morning don’t feel like parts of myself at all.  Caring for the earth or for the homeless or for animal rights or any other rights a person might care about because we’re all interconnected all consequently slip into that last category for me, the “because it’s the right thing to do (because we’re all interconnected)” category.  They’re less about genuine care and more about a concern that I’m trying to drum up because an abstract principle in my mind is telling me I really should do that kind of drumming.  Yesterday.  And you know how much I appreciate that kind of judge.

So how about we propose a psychological angle.  What if I try to do good because I want to be a person who does good.  And if I don’t actually do good, then I feel a disconnect between who I am and who I want to be.  Dissonance.  And I don’t fit in very well with the gooders I really want as friends.  I don’t have good gooder stories to tell when I’m with them and I can’t even get on soap boxes or high horses with them, either, because lord knows I was sitting on my couch last night, too, and I’ve never even been tempted to write my congressperson for anything.  Sigh.

No, trying to get rid of dissonance or spin a character or reputation or set of friends to be proud of just don’t feel like compelling reasons for me to do good, either.

And here’s what really trips me up:  I’m not convinced you can clearly define good anyway.  Snap shots can make good and bad appear simplistically separate, simplistically clear, but really, aren’t the two more often mixed up?  Sometimes it’s the most awful things, the most ugly or evil or extraordinarily pathetic, that lead to positive action.  Don’t they? Like figuring out tough class or race-related things in Katrina’s aftermath.  Like wounded people turning into healers.  Some of history’s biggest embarrassments have been the reason why myriad smaller tragedies haven’t happened, or have actually gotten cared about. 

And sometimes it’s the most well-intentioned things ever – the ones dreamed up by people doggedly committed to making the world a better place – that really, really screw things up.  Think manifest destiny.  Think over-protective parenting. Think any number of technological “advances,” and the Hiroshimas and global warmings and massive oil spills pluming in their wakes.

So.  What does it mean for me to “try to do good”?  What do I presuppose in even asking such a question?

While I won’t try answering that, I will give my conclusion.  You ready?

I know that “good” and “bad” are difficult to separate sometimes, and that the “good” I try to do may actually harm someone, or mess up something better.  But I’m thinking that’s par for this messy life-course.  And I’m certainly not excited about doing nothing because I convince myself that no matter what I do (or don’t do, as the case may be) is part of life’s yin and yang.

So my conclusion?  I want to try to do good in the world because that’s what I like to do.  I like it. It makes me hopeful.  I like it better than doing nothing, and I like it better than knowingly doing bad.  And heck if I understand my complex mix of motives better than that.

I just like it.  [And I’m looking forward to diving into the fray so I won’t have time for this kind of reflection. :)]

But how about you?  Why do you do good?  I’m genuinely curious.

So here are some skeletal conclusions I take from the last conversation:

·        Nothing is perfectly clean – no movement, no institution, no set of relationships.  This is true of spicy and boring lives.  Why not choose spicy?

·        Process matters.  How we work for change is important, and has a lot to do with the kind of change that gets accomplished…and how long-lasting the change turns out to be.  But process isn’t all that matters.  Sometimes messy processes – ones that leave hands and hearts a little dirty for a while – are worth it.  Dark and light are sometimes inextricably mixed.

·        There are instances where a person needs to distance him/herself from a particular group or movement.  Distance can be an important part of a person’s personal growth or healing, but can also be necessary for broader goals to have any chance of getting met.  Gaining trust with a group of disgruntled teens, for example, may necessitate distancing relations with teachers, parents, or police…even when said relations might further some other kind of good.

·        Sometimes, as in the example above, reputation really matters.  It isn’t a gimme that it’s better, as a rule, to care not a lick for how we’re perceived.  Sometimes, though, reputation needs to matter little.  If everyone involved in civil or women’s or gay rights movements cared what society thought of them, important strides forward or up or out would never get made.  I’m guessing smaller-scale, personal examples could be found of this being true as well…maybe cases where no one would know if you chose your reputation over kindness or forgiveness.  Or over getting dirty, but in so doing, participating in something really worthwhile.

·        Life is complicated.  For me right now, what all of this boils down to is being mindful and thoughtful and as awake as I can be in specific instances, rather than abstracting like this forever.  My question to myself becomes:  Is there some specific action I want to take in my life right now where I’m concerned about my own or others’ “cleanliness” – in terms of reputation?  process?  otherwise?  This is a question I need to sit with today.  Or more realistically, this week (can anyone say, “I don’t get very much done in a day – intellectually or otherwise – while caring for an infant”?).

What do you all think of these things?  I’d love to hear examples, like the one Chandra gave, of stuff like this in action – times when it seems worth staying clean or protecting one’s principles or reputation, and times when messiness seems far more worth it.