A message for the 10:00 Foothills community, preached in the park on September 26th and October 3rd, 2021, the first and second Sundays in person after 18 months all online
Reading: Bluebird by Charles Bukowski
Sermon We were two days back after winter break when my family had our best day of pandemic school. My son was actually all online, and my daughter was technically half in person; but both of these things translated to them being at home that day. This is the funny thing about saying kids had school online for the last year – because from the perspective of our kids –their teachers were online, their classmates were online, but they were just home. My partner and I were home too, each in our own by-then well established offices and rhythms. So that when someone texted me to turn on the real live news, on the TV, and I did, it caught the whole family’s attention. Online school lessons stopped, and we all gathered round to watch history unfold in front of us. An angry mob of pro-Trump protestors had broken into the US capitol, and we were watching it all happen on live TV. Josef kept asking the question we were all asking, mom, is this really happening right now? This is real? For a lot of that day, I chose my words carefully: Yes, it’s real. They believe they’ve been lied to, that Trump was actually re-elected. I don’t know why the police aren’t stopping them. You’re right, if they weren’t mostly white, it wouldn’t be like this. I don’t know how it will stop, I don’t understand either. I don’t know what will happen next. To be honest, some of the time, I spoke less carefully. Still, like I said, it was the best day of pandemic school. Because watching it all, we were all learning so much – about history, and about now; about our nation, and about ourselves. Learning is actually terrible, and awful. It’s one of the earliest realizations I had in the pandemic – learning is terrible. I mean, having learned is amazing – when you’re on the other side of it all – you feel fabulous. But when you are really learning, not just in your head - but in your whole self where you are totally discombobulated and everything about how you do anything must be re-constituted from scratch – it is so painful! Especially when the learning must be done quickly, because the new world is already here demanding our adaptation. Do you remember the movie Alien – and that scene where the one guy is at one minute just enjoying regular conversation and the next he’s convulsing and struggling until finally an alien comes out of his chest? Yeah, that’s about what I’ve realized deep learning feels like. A little bit like birthing an alien out of your chest. Like – who is this person I am becoming? What is this world I’m now in? And what’s all this goo I’m covered in? When we think of it this way, it helps us remember that we have all been thrown into a world we don’t understand in the last 18 months, and we are all learning, and learning is terrible – Remembering this helps us stay in the place of compassion – for ourselves, and for the people around us, including the people who attacked the capitol that day in January, or for those who are having a very different understanding of the pandemic, or the vaccine, or other COVID precautions. It helps to remember that we’re all going through something big. And we all have our own story within this bigger story. We’ve all been forced to birth an alien. I mean, we’ve all forced to learn, and it’s been often really hard. It’s important to practice remembering, because too often instead, we’ve practiced forgetting. Too often we perform a careful amnesia that Unitarian Universalist minister Nancy McDonald Ladd describes it as performing - for ourselves, and for each other, our well-being. I mean look at us: we have all have faced multiple moments in the last 18 months where everything we knew to be true was upended, and so many of the things we turned to for comfort and courage - like working out in a gym, or dancing in a crowd, or losing yourself in live theatre, or hanging out with your grandchildren, or gathering on a Sunday in a church - all these things became non options because they were themselves the danger. But through it all, if someone asks, we’re most likely to say - I'm fine. Although my favorite answer that started last year is when someone would say I’m fine and then pause and say, I mean, pandemic fine. There’s a glimpse of the real there. But as we’ve moved into this stage of the pandemic, this stage that is still just as confusing, where we have to learn, and adapt every single day - but now I’ve stopped hearing that phrase- the performance has returned. Like, the poem: I don’t weep, do you? I read this article recently about how there’s this huge uptick in health crises from extreme dieting in the last few months – because we are all so desperate to ensure that it doesn’t appear the pandemic has affected us at all. The threat of climate change, the presence of wildfires, and flooding, shrug. Nah, we haven’t aged, we haven’t lost anyone, or anything, Our kids - maybe they’ve fallen behind a little but they will catch up. There’s no alien to see, no bluebirds. We’re good. All good. I’m not judging. I do it too. It’s a coping technique we’ve all learned. Like somatic teacher Resmaa Menakem talks about, it’s not that we are defective by practicing this performance, we’re protective. We’re not defective, we’re protective. We’ve learned to protect ourselves by acting ok so that we could keep going. I picked the poem from Charles Bukowski for today because I know that during this pandemic we’ve all had to do this. We’ve had to find ways to survive. And some of those ways have required us to push aside what was really happening - because we just had to keep going. Like the song that came out last October, from The Bengsons, the Keep Going On Song - if you haven’t listened yet and don’t know it, maybe turn it on on your way home, or when you get home. The refrain of the song is simple - it just goes: Keep going keep going keep going on song. Keep going keep going keep going on. We have all found our ways to keep going. It’s how you are all here, now. We have found ways to protect ourselves enough so that we could keep going. Especially in the isolation of the pandemic, the isolation we experienced, and that we watched our kids, and our youth experience. We’ve had to compartmentalize some or a lot of what is true in order to keep going. Like in the poem, he says to the bluebird: “Stay down, do you want to mess me up? Do you want to screw up my work?” We should be proud of our survival, and give thanks to our bodies and our minds for bringing us through. And, we also know that this perpetual performance we’ve practiced has a cost. Over time, when keep cutting ourselves off - we lose the language and the skills and the strength to deal with what’s really real - we forget how to be honest with ourselves, let alone with others. We cut connection off with the reality in ourselves, and we cut connection off with others. We numb pain, as Brene Brown reminds us - which means we are also numbing joy. And all this practice does not mean that the things we aren’t dealing with go away - more like, they go underground, become sub-conscious. More likely than not, these things end up guiding our lives and our actions in ways that we don’t even realize. As Richard Rohr says, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” When we don’t heal pain, we pass it on to others. And you can’t heal pain you practice not seeing, you can’t heal pain you’re avoiding or numbing yourself from. You can’t learn the lessons, you can’t metabolize the experience - birth the alien, or set the bird free - because all your energy is going into that protection, that performance. Post pandemic, where we understand the idea of “transmission” at a whole new level - the idea that pain that is not transformed is transmitted - takes on a whole new power. Doesn’t it seem really clear that we are living world shaped by untransformed pain? That pain is the real superspreader? Which means that for as much as the vaccine is the way to heal the virus, the only way we’re really going to heal what’s going on in our world today - all the forces that led to those events at the capitol - and so many other things we’ve gotten through in our time - is birth the alien - learn the lessons, I mean tend to the pain. The pain in ourselves, in others. The pain from the last 18 months, the pain in our country, and the pain that has been passed on generationally – and bring it in as a regular part of our story about what it means to be human, what it means to live a human life – here in Fort Collins Colorado, in the 18th month of a global pandemic. We need to practice remembering rather than forgetting. We need to stop the keeping going on, the pushing through. We need to practice staying put with life as it really is - and holding, and metabolizing it. And we need to do this together. We can only do this together. It’s one of the main reasons we are so excited about this pod experiment, and our return to in person church. Because it’s one of the main things we can and will do together. It’s what church is really about. Here we help each other birth the alien. And set the bluebird free. The bluebird is probably a better image than the alien, right? A better way to talk about what we’re doing when we are learning. This work of deep change where we are adapting to a profoundly changing world. Because this work is so disruptive, and scary, and painful - just like a bird that comes close in always is! - but it is also beautiful. Learning like this offers us something so entirely new that it threatens our whole existence, but it is also a life unto itself. And these things are true about this world, this reality. All that we are holding at bay, all we have practiced holding at bay, it is so disruptive, and scary, so overwhelming - but it also contains the seeds of a new life that calls to us to pay attention, and to listen. It calls us to release the protective performance and the forgetting, and instead remember ourselves, remember each other, stop transmitting all this untransformed pain. Set the bird free, and let’s heal.