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Invitation from a Winter Star

21 December 2020 at 20:29
By: Karen
Conjunction On the longest night of a long, long-shadowed year, a new star shining briefly on the horizon, aligns the slowest planets in the sky. Jupiter and Saturn appear as one, in a proximity 456 million miles wide, to the earthbound eye one fifth the width of the moon. * What proximity might my heart’s […]

Thanks Enough

25 November 2020 at 13:44
By: Karen
Never before, in my experience, has Thanksgiving looked like this — the turkey waiting to be roasted while the guest list dwindles to our immediate household, all of us advised not to gather. Instead, we are asked to shelter in place on a day usually marked by hauling out extra leaves for the table, extra […]

Reading the Signs of the Times

11 November 2020 at 13:37
By: Karen
It first appeared in our yard the Monday of election week. With so much on the line, I guess I was looking for a sign – and afraid of getting one I didn’t want. So the arrival of a white rock dove – as emblematic of peace as anything I could have conjured – was […]

At Arm's Length

14 October 2020 at 10:58
A baby turtle on a beach, with the ocean and two blurred humans in the background.

Karen G. Johnston

Arm's length: What was once a defensive or suspicious expression has now become a gesture of care, an indication of love and protection.

Continue reading "At Arm's Length"

The Lineage of Trust

6 October 2020 at 22:30
By: Karen
Years ago, visiting Lake Superior with a college friend, we walked out on the glassy landscape of that frozen Great Lake. Enjoying the March sunlight already warm on our faces, we stood still, taking in the scene with appreciation and wonder until a loud crack thundered through the ice beneath our feet. My friend Tom, […]

Opening the Doors of Time

22 September 2020 at 15:26
By: Karen
Opening the door, or in other words, the practice of hospitality, has always mattered as a religious principle. Not only to religious communities greeting their guests, but to the very purpose of religious life. As a posture of open-hearted welcome, hospitality insists that only when we warmly greet the stranger will we be capable of […]

Imagining a Way

1 September 2020 at 04:10

One of the best ways I know to get things moving when I’m facing significant change is to engage my imagination. The facts of my situation, and the logic and reason I use to arrange them, will only take me to the edge of what I know. Even using my five senses will only extend as far as the range of my sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. But imagination has the ability to reach farther by accessing the deeper well of the unconscious and creatively rearranging what I’ve known before. The uniquely human capacity to imagine is a valuable threshold skill that can open a way into and through the unknowns of a future filled with change.

When we cling to what we know, it is easy to forget about the massive storehouse of knowledge hidden within each of us, a vast library filed away behind a door aptly labeled β€œthe unconscious.” It is there, in the back stacks of the mind, that our experiences first get shelved. Cognitive scientists tell us less than one percent of that material gets transferred to our conscious mind. Like a β€œclosed stack” library where patrons submit requests for materials to be retrieved by librarians, our unconscious stores an expansive collection of knowledge entirely out of sight. Some of it is also out of reach of language itself, collected and shelved as pre-verbal feelings, sensory experiences and images that constitute the knowledge we call intuition. Dream worker and author Jeremy Taylor called this knowledge β€œnot-yet-speech-ripe,” using an old Anglo-Saxon term for the unconscious.

Fortunately, accessing the treasures of the unconscious does not require mastering the Dewey decimal system or turning to a librarian. Rather, we can be assisted by the colorful cast of characters appearing in our dreams at night, or by any piece of music, poetry or art that speaks to us. We only need to pay attention to anything flinging open the doors to the unconscious and beckoning us in to wander among the hidden stacks, often without knowing what we are looking for.

Imagination, dreams, ritual and the arts are all tools for accessing this larger pool of consciousness. In dominant culture today, these ways of knowing are often disparaged as less reliable and useful than science and historical fact. But any scientist worth their white coat knows that exploration begins with a dance between curiosity and imagination. We need to access a larger body of knowledge, especially when facing an unknown future. Our imaginations, creativity and dreams all extend our awareness to do just that.

Wang Maohua, a tai chi master in Beijing, once gave me an important lesson that changed my understanding of tai chi and now also guides me on the threshold of change. He began our time together by asking me to show him the tai chi I practiced at home. But soon after I launched through several forms, he stopped me. I was pushing myself through the moves, he observed.

β€œTry to focus your attention on the space above your head and below your feet,” he advised instead. β€œExtend your awareness to the space beyond your fingers.” He then led me in a meditative journey through my body, awakening me first to the space within my body and then beyond it. He told me to stop pushing my body. β€œInstead,” he said, β€œlet your body move by a gentle intention into the space around it, where your awareness is already waiting to meet it.”

We can borrow this practice of β€œgentle intention” when living on the threshold, casting our awareness across the gap of the unknown. By imagining ourselves on the far side of our threshold, we are actually stretching our attention beyond the limits of our senses. Gentle intention will open our awareness, allowing us to perceive what lies beneath the surface of things. It is a way of open-ended wondering, imagining what we are moving toward. Then, having imagined ourselves on the far side of the threshold we are crossing, we look up to find our own self waiting there, encouraging us on, and welcoming us as we arrive in a place where we have never been before.

excerpted and adapted from Living in the Between: a thresholder’s guide to personal and global change, by Karen Hering, to be published by Skinner House in late 2020.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172819/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/01.mp3

Be Here Now

24 August 2020 at 20:39
By: Karen
Let’s face it: this can be a challenging time to stay present to the here and now. Ever since the pandemic began, I find myself waking up in the middle of the night marvelling that the world we live in has become more strange than my dreams. I shake my head wondering how to stay […]

A Journey of a Thousand Feet

23 June 2020 at 01:47
By: Karen
Journey is a word we often use for challenging times when outcomes or even the path toward them is unknown. At its most basic, the dictionary defines it as “an act of traveling from one place to another.” It adds that a journey can also be, “a long and often difficult process of personal change […]

A Circle of Light

12 June 2020 at 21:26
By: Karen
The poet John O’Donohue wrote that “A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen.” He said, “To be in the world is to be distant from the homeland of wholeness. We are confined by limitation and difficulty. When we bless, we are enabled somehow to go beyond […]

The Fires of Change

1 June 2020 at 21:12
By: Karen
I am afraid of fire. Ever since I fell into a campfire, hands first as a child, I have a fearful memory for the searing pain it causes. Now, following George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer last week, my city is in flames – fires set long ago with the persistent heat and […]

When the Threshold Is Wide

7 May 2020 at 22:35
By: Karen
It was easily the widest threshold I have come across in an interior doorway – a beautifully finished piece of Pippy Oak stretching more than half a foot on either side of the door. It was sanded smooth as a riverbed stone and varnished like a sacred text written in the script of the tree’s […]

Daily Doorway Writing Prompt

2 April 2020 at 21:16
By: Karen
In his beautiful poem, “The Meaning of Simplicity,” the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos wrote: Every word is a doorway to a meeting, one often cancelled, and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting. In this time of COVID-19 with all the necessary precautions around meetings and contact with one another, […]

Bridging New Distances and Distractions

29 March 2020 at 19:22
By: Karen
Many years ago, my daily bus commute crossed the Mississippi River on the old Lake Street bridge. Then almost 100 years old, the quarter-mile bridge connecting St. Paul and Minneapolis was a wrought iron structure built well before the invention of the automobile. And one day, engineers inspecting the bridge’s integrity, determined it could no […]

The Rhythms of Resilience

3 March 2020 at 14:13
By: Karen
Rhythms of Resilience I’m watching for the first delicate crocuses to break through the hardened crust of the March ground. Yellow, purple and white, their short blooms open like small cups of sunlight. But by night, the delicate blossoms close up, waiting until dawn coaxes them to yawn agape again. Their daily opening and closing […]

The Heart’s Work of Repair

14 February 2020 at 21:35
By: Karen
My grandfather knew how to keep time moving. Head bent over the wooden jeweler’s bench at the back of his jewelry store and peering through a small magnifying loop attached to his glasses, he repaired watches. Patiently disassembling gears and springs, he knew how to put them back together so they could once again keep […]

The Brokenness We Carry

10 January 2020 at 23:11
By: Karen
My friend Leena once brought me a gift from a trip to her family’s homeland in Myanmar – a small seated figure carefully carved in rosewood with great attention to his hatted face, robe and bare feet. But when Leena retrieved the figure from her suitcase after the long flight home, she discovered the wood […]

Cultivating Reverence in Irreverent Times

6 December 2019 at 22:53
By: Karen
As we enter the season of candlelit wonder and awe, I have been considering what reverence means. Is it reverence that stirs when we sing “Silent Night” by candlelight? Was it reverence, in the ancient story two millennia ago, that brought shepherds and kings to their knees before a poor and homeless baby born in […]

Thanksgiving Rules of Engagement

27 November 2019 at 19:59
By: Karen
More than anything, perhaps, the Thanksgiving holiday is marked by messes large and small. Travelers by the millions stalled in airports and on highways. Kitchens from coast to coast piled up with pots and dishes. And some of the biggest messes of all, inside human hearts, anticipating or already experiencing the challenges of gathering across […]

Stopping for Gratitude

11 November 2019 at 23:44
By: Karen
All things end in the Tao as rivers flow into the sea.[1] On a recent writing residency on the eastern edge of Wisconsin, I stayed in the middle of Door County, the state’s narrow peninsula jutting out like a long thin thumb into Lake Michigan. After unpacking my bags, I walked a short distance down […]

American Sacrifice

1 October 2019 at 04:09

Sacrifice is a powerful, ancient, evocative word that conjures images of animals slaughtered in rituals to bind a community together in a celebratory feast for a long-awaited harvest after a drought. Sacrifice can be a visual, visceral and vivid concept that attracts our curiosity but repels us morally. Sacrifice is also described as a blessed act of holy reverence, a necessary rite to cleanse the soul of an individual or restore the hope of a people.

The concept of sacrifice is a complex religious, social and political construct whose meanings derive from cultural experiences and expectations, but I want to explore sacrifice as a political act associated with social violence. These days political and social sacrifice seems ubiquitous, from the rhetorical mobilizations at the U.S. southern border; to the ideological sacrifice of austerity for the poor and largess for the rich; to the “necessary” constructs of neoliberalism and libertarianism that emphasize privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government services. We see the sacrificial environmental violence associated with the lack of urgency to address a rapidly changing climate.

Drill down into the data for an hour, and you will see that sacrificial thinking is the new normal. The motif of “sacrifice” or “blessed brutalities” and sanctioned violence permeate all layers of the social and cultural fabrics purporting to offer an explanatory framework for contemporary imperial American practices. Each instance of our blessed brutality—whether it is the execution of Quakers in Boston in the 17th century, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of native people, or the abuse of wives in the early American republic—is all a distinct trajectory that is the bedrock of the American empire of sacrifice.

Yes, friends, today American sacrifice is an intentional machine gun mounted on a hill of lies that is aimed at the rule of law, the truth and role of expertise. Everywhere you turn, it seems, some form of sacrifice is rearing its head, demanding tribute and governed by an algebra of expected returns. The transactional nature of sacrifice creates unholy alliances and disturbing binary outcomes of either/or.

When we look more closely at sacrifice, we see that sacrifice is a form of violence that places itself in relation to a desired effect, so that the gain depends upon the loss or destruction of something—call this something the offering. The conscious act of sacrifice links the two. The offering might be a black rooster or a packet of tobacco, but it could just as well be a species, a landscape, the heart of a captured enemy or the youth of a nation. What matters is the necessity of this destruction within a logic that renders the destruction understandable—and worthwhile—as a means to some higher gain. Sometimes the terms are blunt, issued as a judgment: This species is common, uninteresting or of “least concern.” This landscape is worthless, remote or uninhabited—it can be destroyed. The minimal value of what stands to be destroyed will be recovered, many times over, in the projected return.

But friends, sacrifice also comes in the disguise of moral control. Just pay attention to the arguments that weave through the next housing development, the next culled species, the next police review board, the next military intervention, the next cut to the Special Olympics. Sacrifice is almost always a mechanism in which loss and gain have been made equivalent, the balance settled—like trading a mountain for jobs in the mining sector, a forest for a highway and a faster commute.

Derrick Bell was the first Black tenured professor in the law school at Harvard, and founder of the academic discipline of critical race theory. His 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well includes an allegory entitled “Space Traders,” which explores what happens when extraterrestrials make first contact with the United States—using a holographic projection of Ronald Reagan—and offer to solve all of the country’s economic and environment problems. As proof of their power, the aliens turn the Statue of Liberty into solid gold and clean the polluted air over Los Angeles and Denver. The extraterrestrials have a price for this service. All Black Americans must be given to the aliens, for purposes unknown.

Will African-Americans become food, pets, subjects for experimentation? Perhaps they will be feasted, protected or worshiped? The extraterrestrials provide no answers. Could this be the ultimate solution to the centuries-old “Negro Problem”? A Republican president and his administration debate the merits of the offer from the aliens and eventually decide that the American people should vote on the matter.

Of course, this outcome has the superficial veneer of being “fair,” because the outcome was “democratic.” The safety, security, and freedom of Black Americans are treated as something illusory, debatable, something that can be compromised. The historic resistance to providing Black people inalienable civil and human rights makes the results clear for the majority of white voters. “Space Traders” concludes with millions of Black Americans—much like their ancestors being loaded into the bowels of slave ships centuries before—being marched at gunpoint into the cargo holds of the alien vessels. A return is calculated, and the decision is made to execute a sacrifice.

When this book came out in 1992, I remember talking about it with Black and white friends and our reactions were reminiscent of the OJ verdict in 1995. Very different responses. Many white friends were horrified by the story, unable to believe that such a vote could happen in the year 2000 when the story was set. Many Black friends were horrified that the white people were so naïve as to believe that it could not happen. And there was still a small set of us (me included) who pondered leaving the US for what could be a better life with the aliens. Many of us said that anything might be better than this place. I was willing to take that trip on the spaceship because the unknowable future might provide me with a new hope that I lack after 400 years in America. What would it be like to live in a world where I am not vilified, minimized, objectified or pacified by a system that has struggled so desperately to obliterate me and my ancestors?

Friends, remember the basic tenets of sacrifice. The sacrificial offering must be destructible—but also, it cannot be worthless. If anything, it must be exalted, because the destruction of its value is what renders the sacrifice worthy, even heroic. Sacrifice infuses the destruction of value with value, justifying itself not only in the prospect of a return, but also in the inherent nobility of surrender. Here the idea becomes not just dangerous, but also insidious, continuously threatening to identify destructive surrender not just as moral action, but also as the very ground of morality. To be good—to be a good citizen, a good person—is to surrender what you value, what you love, for a “higher” cause. In “Space Traders,” one of the ideas floated by the government was to create a selective service for Black people to volunteer to go with the aliens as a duty to country.

As Unitarian Universalists we have the imperative as people of faith to be spiritually animated by the sacrificial violence all around us. We need to be animated enough to see the sacrificial violence in policies that appeal to our heads and ignore our hearts. We need to be animated enough to dismantle false equivalences of sacrifice. We must be animated so we can demand answers, so we can resist the duplicity of sacrifice. We must make our faith three-dimensional enough to resist sacrifices out loud. When people of faith and goodness charge head on into that sacrificial altar to destroy it, the mechanism of sacrificial thinking will be disassembled, their logic revealed, their syntax demystified, and their weapons made inoperable.

So pause for a moment at the next “justified” sacrifice you are asked to vote on or participate in, the next “trade-off sacrifice,” and dwell on these questions: What is hiding among the lines of spreadsheet calculations and seemingly innocent platitudes of this sacrifice? Where is the scapegoat and how is sacrifice being framed? How does this sacrifice hide in plain sight? Whose hopes stand to be fulfilled in this and whose losses are guaranteed? And where do I stand as a person of faith?

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063450/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/02.mp3

Living the Dream

30 August 2019 at 23:00
By: Karen
You could call it our dream house – in many ways it is. Now months after moving in, we still wake up almost every day exclaiming how grateful and happy we are to be here. We love its urban energy, the constant flow of pedestrians walking past in front, the kids from across the alley […]

You're a Unitarian Universalist and didn't know it. Welcome!

16 July 2019 at 18:02

You're a Unitarian Universalist and didn't know it. Welcome!

Curiosity’s Call: far and near

9 July 2019 at 17:09
By: Karen
Freshly returned from a pilgrimage to Transylvania, I recall questions that beckoned me there. Who were the early ones giving voice to the faith that claims me today, and what landscape and history inspired their spiritual quests and convictions 500 years ago? What new discoveries could be unveiled in my heart by visiting these sites […]

wow is Marianne a unitarian universalist or what

28 June 2019 at 01:43

wow is Marianne a unitarian universalist or what

Listening for Wisdom

2 June 2019 at 21:48
By: Karen
Wisdom, says the biblical book of Proverbs, takes her stand at the crossroads. She is found, not in the quiet glen or near the babbling brook where one might expect a wise word to be heard. “Wisdom cries out in the street,” Proverbs’ priestly scribes claim; “in the squares she raises her voice. At the […]

Freedom: the work of wings

30 March 2019 at 15:13
By: Karen
Freedom: the work of wings It was a warm spring day when our chimney began to sing. Birdsong reverberated down, an unexpected gift tumbling into the ashes. But soon after, more distressingly, came the frantic beating of wings. We had forgotten to close the flue and a small bird had dropped through the narrow opening, […]

The Other Side of Resistance

6 March 2019 at 20:33
By: Karen
Have you found yourself resisting recently? In other words, fighting against, or refusing to accept any number of the unacceptable conditions of our times? Let’s face it. There are countless pressures, problems and prejudices today worthy of our resistance. More and more of us are resisting, each in our own ways, and doing so with […]

Paradise and Plenty

10 February 2019 at 21:36
By: Karen
It’s full-fledged winter here in the upper Midwest. Over the past two weeks we’ve seen minus 24 degrees one day and minus 29 the next. The windows frosted. The furnace began to whine. The car stayed put for days – as did we. Then came the snow. And a thaw. Freezing rain. More snow, more […]

When Gratitude Travels

20 November 2018 at 17:11
By: Karen
This Thanksgiving, I am thinking about travelers. Not just the 54 million of us in the U.S. who will travel to a holiday gathering this week, but especially the thousands traveling in the migrant caravan now arriving on the U.S. border. In a news video of their arrival, I have seen the gratitude in their […]

What is lifted rises

5 November 2018 at 14:10
By: Karen
The horrific news of recent weeks feels impossible to bear. Like many others, I have cried, raged, railed, lamented, sought community and sat in desolate silence. This week’s elections may bring what some will call victory, but no matter which winners are declared, we will remain a country dangerously divided. It is important to ask […]

Belonging to Our Longings

12 October 2018 at 13:55
By: Karen
I’ve been doing a lot of longing lately. Every morning’s headlines shouting something I wish were otherwise, I long for the world to be different than it is. Not for the way things were (which has never been that great). But longing for the shared wellbeing and right relationship of Beloved Community, which points me […]

Finding the Right Words

13 September 2018 at 16:36
By: Karen
We’d driven almost 3,000 miles, from the northern Midwest to the southwestern tip of the U.S. and were making our way home last month before I confessed that I hadn’t yet found the right words to describe the extraordinary landscape we were passing through. Expansive wasn’t big enough. Astonishing wasn’t specific enough. Thrilling didn’t do […]

Taking a break

8 August 2018 at 21:19
By: Karen
I took a break from presenting this summer to work on a new book. Then, having turned in my manuscript to my publisher, I took a break from writing with daily word-count goals. Going off-line and on the road, I took the advice of a friend and left my hefty journal behind. Get something fresh […]

Feeding the Future

30 June 2018 at 14:30
By: Karen
Two downy woodpeckers visit the deck in the morning. The female fat with eggs sits on the railing. The male flits between feeder and mate, feeder and mate, seed by seed feeding a future not yet nested. It is coded within whether we’re winged or flat-footed, this care across time. How much we humans have […]

The New Face of Hope

11 May 2018 at 14:08
By: Karen
Finally, spring has arrived. Even so, I hear many folks growing weary of the political storms blowing about every day. The blustery posturing that hawks fear like a street peddler desperate to make a sale. On many a day, I find it hard to believe in the seasonal rising of hope that typically blooms in […]

Tapping Transformation

4 April 2018 at 15:05
By: Karen
Forty to one. That’s the ratio of sap to maple syrup in the long, slow process of creating the amber sweetness my family used to boil and bottle every spring. It’s a ratio that tells you something about the time and determination required to make syrup, but gives no hint of the longer arc of […]

RT @UUA: Most Unitarian Universalists are strong believers in science, medicine, and epidemiology. We encourage everyone who is ...

5 November 2021 at 23:33
RT @UUA: Most Unitarian Universalists are strong believers in science, medicine, and epidemiology. We encourage everyone who is eligible to get vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible.

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