Of Kisses and Politics

As a young adult, I was quite politically active. Boycott, demonstration, or letter writing campaign~~I was your girl! As my spirituality deepened, though, I became less politically engaged. I continued to vote regularly, of course, and even got out on the streets at times to march or campaign for a candidate whose election seemed particularly crucial. But I didn’t like the rancor, the messiness of the whole thing. It just didn’t seem very spiritual, ya know? 

            

The truth is, politics had begun to scare me. To be involved in such divisiveness seemed to run counter to where my soul was leading me. Yet I didn’t quite buy the either/or split I was setting up there. If one purpose of a vibrant spirituality is to bring a fuller and deeper awareness to the entirety of one’s earthwalk, how could politics be off limits? It wasn’t, of course. I just needed to find a way to “do politics” differently. I also needed help not despairing as I watched us careen into an uncertain future.

            

Author and social activist Parker Palmer helped on both counts. On his facebook wall, he writes about individuals who commit to “big values like love and truth and justice.” He goes on to note that “at the end of the road, not a single one of them could say, “The goals to which I devoted my life have finally been secured, now and forever.”            

How do such folks find the fortitude to continue on when things often look so bleak? Palmer suspects it’s all in the perspective held. “Without ceasing to work for whatever results are possible,” he surmises, “they assess their lives by a standard that trumps effectiveness—the standard of faithfulness. They ask themselves three questions: “Have I been faithful to the gifts that I’ve been given? Have I been faithful to the needs I see around me? Have I been faithful to my opportunities to serve those needs with my gifts?”

            

Great questions, huh? With faithfulness as a measure, politics becomes just one more sphere in which to practice. If I remain loyal to my gifts, I will be less likely to add my own twist to the venom I encounter in the political realm, and less likely to become discouraged when things don’t progress in the way I think they should.

            

Palmer’s questions, though, are helpful in assessing any area of our lives. Have we been true to our gifts~~in our family, in our work, in our spiritual lives, in our world? If our answer is mostly yes, then we have been loyal to our purpose here. If not, perhaps it’s time to commit to faithfulness from now on.           

            

Politics and I remain uneasy playmates, and I’m still cautious about the ways I involve myself and how much I absorb of the daily news. But as this election year heats up, with simplistic bumper sticker talk replacing substantive discussion, and nastiness seemingly the name of the game, I am trying to do my part. I hope we all do, for if those who seek harmony and the greatest good remove themselves from the arena, who will be left to make the decisions that affect us all?

            

Being faithful to our gifts and to using them as best we can, reminds us that our job is not to force a particular outcome. Rather, we are asked merely to add our perspective to the mix, and to do so in a way that just might elevate the quality of the discussion.

            

I end with a quote from the mystic Rumi. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

            

Could politics be one of them? Yes, it could.

Wishing you each lots of kneeling and ground kissin'!

Loanne Marie

Here's a link to Parker Palmer's facebook and to his organization The Center for Courage & Renewal.

And here's Coleman Barks, one of the most popular of Rumi's translators, reading a few poems including Spring Giddiness, the one that includes the above quote. The performance is kinda beat and quite fun!

Soldier's Heart

Yesterday we honored our veterans. Today, I ask that you extend that observance just a bit longer while you read these words.

While all who left their homes and their families deserve our appreciation, those who endured combat have earned a special place in our hearts. The wounds sustained may be physical, visible in the body or not. Their afflictions may be of the psyche, visible in their behavior or not.

As a psychotherapist, my experience is with these psychological wounds. What our leaders ask of these men and women is not without cost. Of course, we’d rather not face this fact. Not really. Not fully. Just as many of us turn away from the vet with physical scars, we avert our eyes from his or her emotional suffering as well. We diagnose. We blame. We incarcerate. We ignore.

In a marvelous book, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, educator and activist Parker Palmer refers us to a riff by the brilliant comedian and social critic George Carlin. Carlin made a career of drawing our attention to the various oddities of our culture. In "Euphemisms," he hones in on how we use language to avoid painful realities, particularly the hurt sustained by our combat veterans.

“There's a condition in combat,” Carlin states, “…when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak…can’t take any more…The nervous system has either snapped or is about to.” Carlin then traces the various names we’ve used for this condition throughout the 20th century.

“In the first world war,” Carlin reminds us, “that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.”

Then a change occurred in our language, one that took some of the bite out of the harsh realities of war. In World War II, “the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue,” Carlin explains. “Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much.” Surely nothing a nap or a week of R&R wouldn’t take care of.

Time marched on and one war was replaced by another. During the Korean War, the term had morphed into operational exhaustion. “Hey,” Carlin quips, “we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase…Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.”

Next, of course, came Vietnam and these psychological wounds were repackaged yet again as Post~Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Still eight syllables,” Carlin notes, “but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon.”

It’s that last line that haunts me. Carlin always makes me laugh, but my laughter has an edge to it this time, an uneasiness born of the recognition that his observations may be about language, but the realities he points to are about human beings. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. Children all. Children of our human family. Not statistics. Not machinery. Real human beings, living and breathing~~or trying to~~like the rest of us.

But Carlin missed one name for the psychological wounds of combat. Palmer tells us that during the Civil War,“traumatized combatants developed a condition…called Soldier’s Heart.”

Soldier’s Heart. How incredibly beautiful. How honest. How true.

Heart comes from the Latin cor which, as Palmer notes, "points not merely to our emotions but to the core of the self, that center place where all our ways of knowing converge...The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones." And this is where these kinds of battle wounds reside, at the very core of a person...in the Soldier's Heart.

So on Veteran’s Day 11/11/11, we honored all our veterans~~the living and the dead, those here and abroad, individuals serving in any capacity. But let us each take a moment~~right here, right now~~to sit quietly and envelop every Soldier’s Heart within our own.

Blessings on every Soldier's Heart.

Loanne Marie

PS. Here's a link to Carlin's Euphemisms. Geesh, but I miss George Carlin!

PPS. And for those interested in learning more about an organization seeking to make sure the prevalence of Soldier's Hearts diminishes rather than grows, here's a link to Veterans For Peace.

Habits Of The Heart

With the ground shifting beneath our feet in so many ways, feeling a bit unsettled is to be expected. Our choice of how we respond to the turmoil around and within us, though, is ours alone to decide.

Some of us may react with fear, withdrawing into cynicism or despair. Others might instead cling to idealistic notions that are unable to withstand the tumult of real~world application. While these responses may appear to be in opposition, they are actually twin temptations, linked by the truth that both prevent effective action.

In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, author and educator, Parker Palmer, articulated the need to “hold the tension” between these two poles, recognizing the value each contains but succumbing wholeheartedly to neither.

Notice the phrasing. Palmer did not encourage us to tolerate the tension or to withstand it. He urged us to hold that tension, for holding requires us to grow larger than either pole, greater even than both together. As we enlarge ourselves, we achieve the vision that allows us to assess both extremes, discern the truth lying within each, and conceptualize a viable path forward which incorporates the best of both.

Whenever we confront a choice between seeming opposites, it is wise to search for the synthesis between them. This has been described as going through the horns of a dilemma~~which certainly beats being impaled by either!

As we consider the current state of our world, though, how do we negotiate between the horns? This middle way includes facing head~on the very grave difficulties before us, but doing so with trust that effective solutions can be found and enacted through our hard and sustained efforts.

Simplistic and emotionally~laden thinking is the easy way. Far more is required of us now~~to fully appreciate the serious difficulties we face, accept that there are no simple, easy, or perhaps even already envisioned answers, and nevertheless trust that we can develop a viable strategy for moving forward.

With this in mind, Palmer also spoke of the challenge to cultivate appropriate “habits of the heart.” The ability to hold the tension between despair and idealism is one such habit. But there are many others, including...

• Commitment to substantive discourse with those with whom we disagree.
• Tolerance for ambiguity.
• Compassion, meaning literally “to suffer with”.
• Appreciation for diversity.
• Conscious use of our unique energy, in ways minute and grand.
• Trust in the inherent goodness of ourselves and others.

We live in turbulent times, to be sure. Our response, though, is anything but certain. We could use these times to nurture precious habits of the heart.

In Parker’s words, we could then “take (this) broken~hearted experience in a new direction, not towards the shattering into a million pieces but toward a heart that grows larger, more capacious, more open to hold both the suffering and the pain of the world.” And, I would add, its piercing beauty and possibility, as well.

Whatever challenges we face personally and collectively, we could see in them opportunities, fodder in our quest to grow a healthier, more soulful heart.

Have a lovely week growing your own heart!

Namaste!

Loanne Marie