Sometimes Confession is the Best Response: A Time to Break Silence #4

I remember 1967. I was in seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High School. Phones were still attached to the wall and only answered by people who were home when they rang.  Computers were huge and owned by big businesses. Schools were segregated. Protests felt like things that happened worlds away or on TV.

While I was captivated by the task of putting together a chicken skeleton for my biology experiment, Dr. Martin Luther King preached at Riverside Church, saying,

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.1

These words are particularly chilling to me.  If King thought we were a “thing-oriented society” in 1967, what would he think today?  The enormity of the task of undergoing a “radical revolution of values” seems hopeless.

I carried my heavy heart into church last Sunday where I was reminded that Lent starts this week, beginning with Ash Wednesday.  Since my first trip to Haiti in 1996, the Ash Wednesday liturgy has had a special place in my heart.  It is the only time when the Episcopal community asks for forgiveness of our cultural sins—sins such as values honoring “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” more than people.

“We confess to you, Lord …our self-indulgent appetites and ways … our exploitation of other people … [and] our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts. …

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty … prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, for our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us. …”2

Breaking the silence about the ashes of our failures as a society, gives me the first stirring of hope that something new is possible.  Even now.

1. Fourth in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, HYPERLINK Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. Next in the series is titled, “The Clarion Call.”

2. “Ash Wednesday liturgy, in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press), 267-268

Medium Topics after Noon: A Texas Girl Takes a Nap

The Big Topics are exploding everywhere. These days it seems that violence and chaos clang as loudly as last week’s Christmas Carols and today’s New Year’s Greetings.

Evening darkness will gather soon—a little after four in the afternoon here in Portland, OR. The ground is still soggy from weeks of rain.  It’s cold and cloudy.

It must be time to take a nap.  Times like these require an extra dose of self-care even as inner voices shout that the needs of the world and my life are too demanding to stop for a while.

Today, I will head the call.

Take a bath.  Lie down in the middle of the day.  Feel the earth under my feet.  Remember my connection to Spirit.  Listen.  Or prop up my feet and read a good book.

The old is crumbling and the new is slowly emerging.  Transition, in birthing children or thriving communities, is wild.  But, for now, right after high noon, rest is needed.

Winter Solstice, 1986

Sue last photoTwenty-six years ago, around midnight of December 21/22, Mary Sue Tipps Mathys died. The woman who gave me the gift of life and mothered me so well, died at 60 years of age. This chapter from Big Topics at Midnight tells about that holy night. 

Mom was a godsend. Despite her warning that she wasn’t going to be one of those “over-involved” grandmothers—since she had a full life of her own—my parents’ home became an oasis from the chaos of married student housing. Each month the four of us traveled ninety miles south for a visit. Mom carried infant Laura around the house so Howard and I could sit down to eat a meal. In the afternoons, Mom and four-year old Paul went on “Grand Adventures” around town. They walked up and down Fisherman’s Wharf, looking at the harbor seals and bags of sea shells for sale and went on regular visits to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, stopping at the otter tank for the afternoon feeding.

After Thanksgiving, Mom and Paul decorated the first Christmas tree Laura had ever seen. Mom’s gruff exterior melted as she enjoyed the antics of her young grandchildren.

That all came to a screeching halt around midnight of the winter solstice. The shrill phone woke me from a sound sleep.

“Nancy, Mom’s gone,” Dad said.

“Gone?” I asked.  “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

Almost a month before Laura’s first birthday, and three days before Christmas, my mother was dead. She was putting the last stitches on holiday decorations when her heart stopped beating.

This woman who, thirty-two years earlier, had held me for nine months nestled under her heart, slipped out of her body on the darkest night of 1986. Paul insisted on going to the funeral home to see her body. Standing at the edge of her coffin, he asked that I lift the lower half of the lid so he could make sure that she would leave this earth with the feet that had led the two of them on so many wonderful adventures.

I held my full moon baby close to my broken heart as I ached for the loss of my own bright mamma during that dark season of grief.

Mom's drawing from the Christmas Card she mailed the week before she died.
Mom’s drawing from the Christmas Card she mailed the week before she died.

Sometimes lists. Sometimes listening.

I am a list queen.

Right now, I have three lists going at once—things I need to do next week, my general list and a book  order list.

Tonight at 11:30 p.m., I left behind a gently snoring Howard to get up and write down a detail about the book’s coming out party next week (on my general list) and the name of a friend who wanted me to send her mother a copy of my book (book order list).  Then I noticed that my general list was too messy—too many things crossed out—so I rewrote the list.

It’s almost midnight, and here I am still up.  Again.

I recall my reputation with grocery lists.  Nine times out of ten, I either leave my list at home or on top of the onions in the produce aisle within ten minutes of beginning my shopping.  Eight times out of those nine, I get home from the store with almost everything that was on the lost list. Knowing that about myself, however, doesn’t calm my urgent fears that THIS TIME I will forget something.

With my book just out in the world and the huge unknowns of marketing looming large in my mind, I want to cling to lists—mine and the ones that fill self-publishing books. The trouble is that my best work doesn’t flow when I’m trying to check things off.  I may feel efficient, yet something is missing.

Odd thing is, I know that my creative juices flow best when the prompting comes from deep inside me, bubbling up from my belly.  I wake with a few sentences luring me to sit down and write.  An urge arises to call someone.  An idea comes for a gathering of friends to mark a special moment in our lives.  Thoughts arrive gently, seemingly out of nowhere, each holding a bit of sparkle.

These nudges seem untimely, scattered or illogical when I try to understand them with my mind.  But time and time again, they lead to places beyond anything imagined or possible through my lists.  I get an image of the big picture of marketing the book—reaching out to meet people who are already waking up to the big topics rather than me out trying to sell the book—and suddenly the numerous details don’t seem as important.

While writing Big Topics at Midnight, I began to learn the language of my body.  Now when I pay attention to my belly or back, it gives me information about unnoticed feelings or the need to stop for a few moments and stretch. I’ve learned to hear these subtle forms of guidance even though my head often shouts that all of this intuition stuff is just a burp from my imagination.

I was born with a mind that easily learned the “right” form of intelligence—think things through, be logical and rational, and be able to defend my thinking with solid facts.  Only later did I discover the wisdom of my belly, intuition and Spirit.

It wasn’t easy to incorporate this more feminine way, of knowing, and the power of the “one right way” has a stronghold on me.  Things on my lists seem so urgent, so clear.  Intuition, on the other hand, comes sometimes in a haze and always with its own timing.  I’m not fond of waiting.

It is 12:15 a.m.  I’m up with the cool night breezes and occasional cars driving by trying to remember what I know: My most important spiritual practice is learning how to stand in the middle of the paradoxes of life.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

Actually, it’s a pain sometimes.

Lately I’ve stumbled under the weight of getting to all of the tasks on my book lists.

Still, I want to do both—following my inner guidance and my carefully crafted agenda.

So I fall down.  Then I stand back up again and return to my practice of taking the best from both approaches.  Sometimes lists.  Sometimes listening.  Sometimes pushing forward to get things done.  Sometimes sitting outside under the tree and slowing down enough to hear that still small voice inside.

Sometimes I’m a listening queen.