vitalwholeness

Today I received a thank you from across the years, a token of appreciation for service I provided many years ago. Sometimes we forget or don’t remember what impact we’ve had on people’s lives until someone thinks to tell us.

Remember that key person, mentor, leader, lover, partner, associate, family member, classmate, teacher, or coach who made a real difference for you, was there just at the right time, contributed to your personhood, vocation, or even life and death survival?

Tell them. They might not even know what they meant to you.

Tell them.

Mr. President – Stop listing political enemies by name in your rallies, encouraging fans to chant “lock ‘em up.”

Stop encouraging and rewarding acts of aggression and violence among your tribe.

Stop naming the free press as the enemy of the people.

Stop projecting your sins onto the personages of your opponents.

Stop the pretense of Presidential statements when you drain them of meaning with your later real statements of partisan politics.

Stop using our tax money to fly to your rallies – not the whole American people – Airforce One and all the secret service.

Cease and desist. We will be rid of you and your tribe as soon as possible. We will  never stop resisting you. We will save democracy from you.

Stop.

None of us are spared – not one – from the onslaught of suffering that comes knocking at our doors. If the knock hasn’t yet come you can be sure that the hand of adversity is patient. It can wait us out and it does.

Adversity comes as the result of our own foolishness. Adversity comes because of the evil intentions of hearts that went dark. Much adversity seems little more than random; the weather pattern here, the timing there, our place of birth or some radical gene that until now has been out of country on holiday. For whatever host of reasons the time finally comes. We don’t seek it, we don’t want it, even if we threw the first rock that created the waves.

Our greatest inclination in the face of adversity is to cling tenaciously to the past. That’s where our moorings used to be. Used to be. But life before the arrival of the unwelcome guest will never be the same again. It’s gone. No matter how many times we sort through the assumed reasons things took place, the stories we or others concocted to explain what it all means, it is little more than a vapor. Which is why we have to discipline ourselves to see differently.

The quagmire of memory obscures our view of the real time trees waving in the fall breeze, the leaves falling right now as all things do fall. To be present, truly present, requires a certain defiance. To be present requires shaking a determined fist toward tired definitions that must discarded like a snake sheds its skin. Shed the valuations of others first; they are the least important. Then shed your own old worn out props. Drop those chains and let them sink to the bottom of the sea. Did you see and hear the bird greeting the morning? That is the voice of authority.

The real answer lies in the future – a shrouded future, to be sure – but the future. Every new possibility lives in that future house. If you’re going to take out a mortgage, let it be there, in some property on the edge of tomorrow. Sit on the deck that faces east and wait for every new rising.

At the same time that we become alive to the present – its every sense, movement, and unfolding – we orient ourselves to the future. It’s always arriving with gifts, the future is. And we know new things as a result.

And what? We learn a whole host of things all at the same time. We discover who are and who are not real friends. We identify and discard the superfluous. We don’t let the perspectives of others move into our house and take over the the living room. Since time is fleeting we don’t waste it on the unimportant. It doesn’t matter what people think or say: You decide. And you’ll be glad you did.

Adversity carries crystal clarity in its vest pocket.  That clarity reveals what direction the next chapter requires even without a detailed itinerary. There is freedom. Take it and don’t apologize to anyone for doing so. Take courage, too, for we have to stand tall with wonder in the present even as we look to the mystery of the future. For God’s sake don’t let anyone tell you what the ultimate meaning of the universe is. Don’t let anyone lecture you on God. And when people do bad things in this sorted world stand against them. Whether you stand for yourself or for the good of others do stand. Let the scars of battle be your teachers. Let them talk.

But wait, we must wait. We have to wait for joy. It creeps up from the dark side of the moon and spreads into a half-smile. When joy creeps over that lunar landscape it must be ridden, like a wave. The triumph of joy is that all the other categories by which we used to define ourselves start groaning and creaking, falling apart. Just let them, watch them, they’re not real.

Do you notice that well of energy and light that seems to flow at the same time from the center of you and from the still point at the center of the spinning universe? Yes, that’s it. That’s the joy that has been unmasked by adversity. Thank God, unmasked.

Now we’re ready. For anything and everything.

On this November’s ballot there is a special initiative – Amendment 1 – which is referred to as Clean Missouri. This amendment is essential to ridding our state of corruption in the political process. Though we cannot undo the tremendous damage that the Supreme Court inflicted on our country with Citizens United, Clean Missouri can take some very positive state-wide steps.

Clean Missouri limits the gifts of lobbyists, puts caps on the amount of campaign contributions, requires open “sunshine” laws applied to all our politicians, sets a two year pause between when a legislator finishes a term and begins as a lobbyist, and establishes fair an impartial methods to overcome the gerrymandering of district lines.

Missouri has been corrupted by big money. Our politicians draw district lines so that politicians choose constituents rather than constituents choose their politicians. That can all change. Make sure and vote YES on Amendment 1.

For more information spend some time on the Clean Missouri website exploring Amendment 1 for yourself.

Change often comes in catastrophic burps; the earthquake, explosive revolution, the sudden unexpected death. There is no preparation and we are thrust involuntarily into a whole new unfamiliar world. That happens and happens quite a bit, really.

But the more common experience of radical change is measured more in drips. Slowly, one drip after another, the whole personal, social or even global reality shifts. The thing about dripping is the repetition. We come to accept the present drip because of the hundreds that have preceded the most recent one. Oh, well, another one. It becomes so … normal.

We are living in an era of vast political dripping, one drop after another. A global rainfall is scattering its showers all over the globe, including in the United States. This is the rain of autocracy, fascism, oligarchy, and strong man control politics. One could hope that this is the last gasp of an endangered species, homo power hungry, but I don’t think so. I think we are in for a long, sustained and very painful ride.

The drips of this despotic storm are slowly but surely eroding the values and accomplishments of many of our long-standing democracies. What took decades of struggle to build is being dismantled drip by drip. Criticize the system as you will, for there is much fault to be found, but the present reigns of terror are not reforming. They are dynamiting.

Though the form varies from place to place the goals are similar: Consolidate power, silence and often destroy the press, favor white establishment culture, design tax laws to favor the mega-rich, employ law enforcement to silence dissent, destroy independently acting Congress and Judicial branches, prefer corporate interests to individual rights, compromise patriotic values for treasonous corruption, control the entire system and politicians with vast unaccountable money, manipulate the masses to act immorally, violently and against their own interests, and target scapegoated groups.

History does repeat itself, if not exactly then close enough. I believe that we will live to see “national emergencies” used to justify police state actions, suspension of citizen rights, delay of elections, elimination of term limits, the silencing of dissidents, the imprisoning of leaders of the resistance, and state controlled media. Right now Fox News serves that propaganda function. That program may expand far beyond Fox in the future.

Alignment with strong-man monarchies and autocracies shifts the United States more decidedly toward the autocrat club. Unilateral actions that defy international law and dismantle long-standing agreements and accords are just the first step. Utilizing tariffs as a political tool is another. Severing ties with allies and realigning with empires such as the Nation of Putin is another. Ignoring science in favor of corporate expediency insures the loyalty of the big money to the autocrats. In time the intellectuals and scientists will be contained in order to eliminate their inconvenient perspectives and even facts.

And keeping the under classes fighting one another and incoming “threats” such as new immigrants is part and parcel of the master plan to retain power. Defending good white people from this menace becomes the sacred trust of the dictator and his cronies. He will defend and protect us, as long as we relinquish certain freedoms.

I wish I could say that this may be coming. But I cannot. The ship has already arrived in harbor. The only question that remains is just how far this drip by drip regime will go until it floods every crack and cranny of nation and world. A nuclear incident, for example, could be very helpful in the effort to consolidate power even more. So could an engineered civil war, a reenactment of the mid-19th century … but without the conscience of a Lincoln to guide our worst inclinations. We already observe the way presidential rhetoric is creating that psychological atmosphere. The language of fear is energizing the masses: The crazy, deranged mob that is attacking us from over the border, within our ranks, and from the other party is on the way. Get more ammo. Prepare yourself for the onslaught.

Unless this momentum is blocked and blocked soon it will get much, much worse. And without a hint of exaggeration I say that our young republic will go the way of many previous empires that rose and fell, or rose and changed into something monstrous.

What this requires is people of courage who dare to cast a different vision for life, name a different set of values, and identify different priorities. Ironically, the way forward in this time will include reminding ourselves what our founders – with all their own blind spots and biases – called us to be. The Constitution itself, that most remarkable strong and changing document of our common life, must rise to the top of our minds, and I mean more than only the 2nd Amendment.

The answers have always depended on people power and moral vision. It is the same today. Come together, friends. Do not be afraid. Be strong. Stand together. Resist the worst we can become and strive for our highest selves.

If you are a person of faith let your faith propel you to a place beyond just thoughts and prayers. Speak your understanding of a God that has been distorted and then presented to the world in the form of something that scarcely resembles the God of Jesus. Name it. Denounce distortions. Critique false churches and their leaders. And in the end realize that the birthing of a new world requires hard and sweaty labor. It always has.

Michael Moore hits another one out of the park with his latest docu-commentary, Fahrenheit 11/9. It’s out in most theaters now and now is the time to see it. In fact, after you see it try to enlist some of your friends to go, especially those who don’t feel any special need to register and vote. A little shock therapy never hurt anyone.

Listening to interview with climber of “El Cap” and his perspective on free climbing the most perilous rock walls in the world. When asked by his girl friend if she ever enters into his equation about whether to take these huge life and death risks, he asks a clarifying question: “Does that equation include extending my life span as long as possible?”

“Yes,” she replies.

He answers, “Then no, not if that equation means extending my life span as long as possible.”

It’s the only answer he can give. He couldn’t do what he does and also be seeking the longest life span as the highest value.

How would we change how we live if living as long as possible was not our most important goal?

That’s right – vote on Nov 6! And take three people with you!

What a sublime and wholly under appreciated gift it is to choose your friends rather than have them chosen for you, to assign the amount of time your most important interests, causes, and relationships deserve.

In a world of obligation liberation often comes in the simple movement from one word to another, from must to may.

One dimension of the recent furor over the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice are assumptions about the way that memory functions, especially memory surrounding trauma. For those of us who have spent countless hours listening to people’s stories of trauma this polarized debate seems strange. Some have declared that unless the entire story is remembered en toto testimony lacks credibility. Others reflect a different view, that memories are somewhat like photographs and to be trusted in the same way. Both views are found wanting.

First, traumatic memories are encapsulated within a mental story line and that story line contains a series of capsules/memories/recorded impressions attached to sensory experiences. As I have worked with vets processing a firefight, for instance, they remember particular things – not all things – but standout fragments: A powerful odor, the expression on someone’s face, a deafening sound, an image and its color. All of the emotions of the entire trauma are vested in these capsules and the work of clearing the emotions from these individual pieces is crucial to draining the entire story of its crippling emotion.

When a person who has experienced assault remembers pieces those pieces are the embodiment of the whole story. They are the standout memories of intensity. And when you deal with those you are dealing with the whole story. They are as real as real can be. In fact, in terms of healing, unless you get to the particular you probably won’t make much progress.

On the other hand our memories are not like video recordings of what happened. They include our sensory experience of the moment, selective attention to certain details and not others, and our interior reactions to outer events. That is why no two people have exactly the same memory of the same event; only a consensus of many eyes and brains creates some believable scenario that may have taken place. The memory of one person includes partial remembrance and very personal emotional response.

And of course, memory can change. We do change memories every time we access them. Our minds contain surprising ways to interpret and give meaning to what has happened. That is one of the hopes of therapy; we can actually adjust memory, add additional interpretation, and even complete unfinished stories in redemptive ways. So memory is never static.

I remember the death and funeral of my mother in a very particular way with very particular images in my mind. These same images, however, are not shared by my brother who ostensibly passed through the same experience. Our two recollections are very different. What we can do is remember and hold the emotional response, the importance we have granted the event, and deal with that. Though my brother and I don’t have identical memories of our mother’s passing and the the death rituals that followed, we do know how much it impacted us and left its powerful mark on our young souls. That very subjective reality we do share. But it is not a record that can be objectified.

As regards this current high court nomination and its resistance, I observe several things based on these realities of memory:

Nothing like objectivity can be attained by an exchange of he said/she said testimony. It is too subjective. That can only be corroborated through multiple attestation. Short of that, nothing conclusive can be determined. And if anyone in power limits investigation so that multiple witnesses are excluded, they short-circuit the search for truth.

Fragmentary memories are not to be dismissed, especially from supercharged traumas, either recent or from the distant past. I’ve experienced people accessing and sharing these kinds of memories in exactly these kinds of ways. As I listened to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford it rang quite authentic in its fragmentary nature and emotionally charged content.  It should not be dismissed because it was partial. In fact, taking the emotionally super-charged story line seriously – as a testimony of emotional impact – is the least level of empathy we should extend.

No memory, however, is utterly objective and unchanging. That includes the memory of Brett Kavanaugh. His memory, too, is partial and the product of his own emotional and mental state at the time. He, too, has changed his memory over time to conform to the self he believes he is and others believe him to be. That’s what we do. Quite apart from any attempt to intentionally mislead is the subjective nature of memory itself. Which is why, of course, multiple attestation is so important.

It has often been said and I believe it to be true that what we remember about a person is not what they said to us but rather how we felt about them at the time. That reality is surely in play as a part of this highly emotion-filled and politically charged issue. Whatever the truth of Kavanaugh’s history and the ways he has either stayed the same or changed in intervening years, what is remembered by one woman so very long ago is the powerful and real feelings she had in a particular place and moment in time. Since we cannot observe it for ourselves and witnesses are kept unavailable to corroborate the stories for us, we can never know, not for certain, the meaning of what was experienced for that woman in that terrifying moment.

None of this simplifies seeking conclusions or making decisions. In fact, it makes it more complex. Make of all this what you will, but I know one thing for certain: The way that public persons have dismissed the testimony of a person attempting to share a traumatic experience is bone-chilling. It reinforces the tendency of people to not share their pain and instead carry it alone and in silence. This will not help those persons who find themselves in great peril in situations of domestic abuse. This will not help persons who have been raped and who will not be believed.

During my years of hearing many stories of trauma I have learned to say one thing if I don’t say anything else. It is the one thing that doesn’t depend on absolute rational, objective proof or a water-tight story. And it is this: I believe you. I have said that more times than I can remember. And they may be the most important words I’ve ever spoken.