A funny thing happened on the way to this Quest issue. We switched our topics from one month to another, and I neglected to notice it when I reached out to colleagues for submissions. I recruited great material for an issue on spiritual practice (which you’ll see next month), happily left for a wonderful two week-break, and thought I was prepared for our editorial meeting the day I returned.

Then, the night before I was coming back, I saw an email from Lynn Ungar, Quest’s editor, reminding the team that we’d be meeting the next day on the theme of … what!?!?!? MISTAKES!!! I had recruited nothing. I had prepared nothing. I had done…you guessed it…nothing! Except that I had lived out the theme, by making a colossal mistake!

Hastily, I reached out via social media to my colleagues to explain this ironic situation…could they please, immediately, without hesitation, send me stuff they’d written about mistakes? With love and humor and willingness, a record number of submissions were in my mailbox within a couple of hours.

My experience, and many other experiences just like it, show to me over and over that when I make mistakes, other people are ready to lean in and support me, to pick up what I dropped, to help me out. In fact, the mistake I made encouraged my colleagues to be quicker with sharing what they had written than if I had asked them far in advance to do so. My own imperfection, I suspect, invited them to send in pieces which, given time, they might judge too imperfect to share.

Of course, I recognize that part of my privilege as a white middle class person is that I am allowed to make mistakes that other people—immigrants, people of color, people who defy gender binaries, poor people—are not allowed to make without punishment. We need only look at who is incarcerated, for how long, for what charge, in order to know that not all mistakes are treated equally. And not everyone has a community ready and willing to support them in times of vulnerability.

Which is one of the main reasons I have spent my life’s work in spiritual communities. We exist, first and foremost, to provide support for one another’s essential nature, which is vulnerability. In spiritual community, mistakes aren’t graded. We aren’t ranked and valued in order of our ability to perform, to act perfect, to measure up to one another’s expectations.

Some years ago I was practicing Vipassana meditation at a retreat with the teacher Sharon Salzberg. Salzberg has brought the practice of Metta, or lovingkindness, meditation to many of us in the west. At this retreat, she said that she has come to define the act of meditation as the lovingkindness we show to ourselves when we notice that, once again, our attention has wandered. This definition brought delight to me because my attention wanders over and over and over. “Oh!” I said, “That means, the more our attention wanders, the more chances we have to be kind to ourselves about it!” She beamed at me. “Yes,” she said.

What if our communities were centered in this same way, that we understood that we were at our strongest and finest when we showed kindness to those who make mistakes? Even bad mistakes? Instead, in the United States, we have become increasingly intolerant, cruel, and judgmental about others’ mistakes, or even perceived mistakes. Too often, social media has become a platform for judgment, indictment, contempt. This is why CLF often says that we like to bring grace to the internet: we affirm people, just as the vulnerable messes of contradictions and spectacular beauty and pain and failure that we are, from birth to death and every day in between.

Can you imagine a time when everyone’s mistakes are the wake up call to lovingkindness, the type of lovingkindness that my colleagues showed to me? Can you imagine a world in which every breath is an opportunity to love again, no matter how far astray our mind has wandered again? Do you, like me, long for a world in which every one of us believes that despite all of our mistakes, we are still worthy of love? As far as I’m concerned, that’s what we’re doing here now, in our own radically imperfect way: Trying to build that world in which love is the constant through all our wandering and our wobbling.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_06/06.mp3

I grew up in a deeply political UU family. From the earliest time I can remember, we talked about politics and religion at the dinner table. I don’t know if my parents did this to counteract the influences which were coming at us from our conservative Baptist neighborhood, or if it was simply what they liked to talk about, but my three siblings and I were all weaned on political discourse.

By the time we were adolescents, my siblings and I had done things like make lobby visits on issues we cared about, campaign for chosen candidates, put unpopular bumper stickers on our bikes, argue with our schoolmates during recess about the issues of the day and write letters to the newspaper. It has been surprising to learn, especially as an adult, how rare this experience was. Many of my friends have told me that they never thought about politics, and that their parents never talked about the subject.

The small UU fellowship in West Virginia where I spent my elementary school years in the 1960s was awash in the political issues of the day, mostly connected to civil rights. It was, after all, Adlai Stevenson who helped my parents find Unitarian Universalism. Stevenson, who ran for U.S. President in 1952 and 1956, shared that he was a Unitarian. My parents had never heard of Unitarianism, but they decided if Stevenson, whom they loved, was a Unitarian they wanted to check it out. The story goes that my mother went to church in Houston, Texas in 1956, while my father stayed home with the three of us kids, aged baby to five. When my mom got home, she said, “Church was fine, but coffee hour was great! I have found our people!” They spent the rest of their life as UUs, though not as Texans.

I think about how it must have felt for them to find their people in those days of the McCarthy hearings, living in a very conservative place where they had just moved for my father’s first job. To find a community that was open-minded and progressive, to meet other people who had similar values and commitments to fairness and democracy. And I think about all the people now who could benefit similarly, who are bereft in a world gone increasingly authoritarian, who are lonely for human contact in a world that is increasingly driven by technology, who are longing for a place to reconnect with fundamental decency and kindness. This is one reason why I am so committed to sharing Unitarian Universalism—because people need spiritual homes in hard times!

For me, politics and religion have always been inseparable, using the definition of politics which folks like the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone espoused:

Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.

But that connection of religion and politics is complicated. In the US today, politics have increasingly become equated with partisanship, with politicians seeming to dream of and aspire to nothing more than re-election. That kind of politics has no place in spiritual communities—our faith is not on the ballot.

I spent 10 years living in Washington DC and directing the UUA’s justice work there. We worked in interfaith coalitions for bills that supported our faith commitments to justice and equality and democracy. I can also say that we never worked on a bill that we felt 100% good about. Every single one of them was problematic in one way or another. That, I think, is what partisan politics is about—profound compromise, and 51% of the vote.

I think that getting the necessary percentage of the vote, in the United States at least, has been part of the divisive place to which we have gotten—that all of the major cities and even the larger towns are much more progressive than the rural areas. Political parties in the US significantly wrote off rural areas because we can achieve 51% of the vote without them. No outreach, no education, no campaign efforts to speak of. I wish progressive folks spent more time reaching out to rural areas, where (again, in the US) white nationalists and other hate groups have been actively recruiting for decades.

I get why political parties use limited resources to win elections. That’s their goal. Don’t get me wrong; winning an election is no small thing! But faith, unlike partisan politics, is about clear and uncompromising values, and including all of the people. People of faith have a different charge around spreading our values than political parties do. Whether our chosen candidates in the elections have won or lost, our charge is to keep reaching out with values which are more clear, consistent and sharp than what is possible to pass in the legislature. It’s up to us, not the politicians, to be clear about our values and to insert them into public discourse.

My siblings and I raised our own kids the way we were raised—to see the value in serving the common good, to work for a better world. This next generation lives in three countries now, and the form the work takes varies from person to person and place to place. But the values I was raised with continue on in my family, and I remain grateful for my early grounding in connecting up spiritual beliefs with work for justice, and for Unitarian Universalism’s commitment to a democratic and fair world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121754/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/05.mp3

Alice Walker has been in the media in some pretty awful ways, but I still think her book, The Color Purple, is one of the most extraordinary theological texts I’ve ever read. Her description of God wanting praise the same way people do has echoed in me ever since I read it more than 30 years ago:

[Shug says] “Listen, God love everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.”

“You saying God vain?” I [Celie] ast.

“Naw,” she say. “Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

“What it do when it pissed off?” I ast.

“Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

I love that. And the reciprocity described is what I feel when I am gardening, that the earth is offering to me as I offer to the earth, and together we co-create beauty and nourishment. Praise be!

For me, gratitude and praise go hand in hand. When I am grateful for something, I praise it. When I praise something, I am grateful for it. And when I am grateful and praising, my generosity follows naturally. Whether it’s the generosity of admiration or the generosity of attention or the generosity of support, I cannot be stingy when I am genuinely praising something or someone.

I think about when I am in a restaurant with someone and order something delicious. “Oh my! You have to try this!” is the first thing out of my mouth. If the deliciousness caused me to say Mine, all mine, it would mean I was not in gratitude or praise, but rather clinging to ideas of scarcity. Generosity comes from a place of abundance. Sharing creates more joy!

Praise generates gratitude, gratitude generates abundance.

Ideally. But those threads can break when the currency of generosity is taken instead of reciprocated. Increasingly, with pesticides and genetic tinkering and huge equipment, agribusiness does not praise the gifts of the earth, but seeks domination, a whole different form of currency.

I see it in a smaller scale when I offer a gift to someone—say, hospitality in my home—and rather than receiving thanks or generosity back, I experience the guest taking from me without appreciation, ignoring my requests or needs, concerned only with their own. My generosity, gratitude and praise can fizzle into resentment over time.

Which makes me think about Job. The guy who was living a good, faithful life, praising God and being ethical and kind, until Satan dared God to curse Job and see if Job remained faithful. So God killed Job’s family, destroyed his livelihood, and otherwise “tested” his faith. When Job finally cries out in anguish God says, basically, What do you know? I created the whole world and can do anything and you can’t do much at all can you? And we’re told Job then praises God.

When you look online for interpretations of this text you find all kinds of folks telling you what a great story it is, and how it shows that we need to praise God no matter what if we are faithful. I hate the story, myself. I loathe it. Years ago, in a religious education class, the curriculum was to share that story with fifth graders and then give them shaving cream on tables with which to finger paint what they thought about God. I needed to step out for a minute during the finger painting, and when I came back into the room they had thrown it everywhere in a giant finger paint fight.

They told me the story made them mad, and that was part of what started the foam-throwing. We talked as we cleaned the room and they were indignant that God would make a bet with Satan and be so mean to Job because of it. And I had to agree with them. The story does nothing whatsoever to strengthen my faith in God!

But maybe there’s another path besides faith in an omnipotent God to find a way to praise and gratitude when suffering profoundly. I note the people who have much, much less material comfort and wealth, societal privilege, and freedom to move about seem to manage better than I do to stay in a place of generosity and gratitude. I also realize that my own ability to remain in the currency of generosity and praise is in part the result of too much privilege. I have been awed, in my life, by the kindness and generosity of people who have reason to be much more resentful about their lives than I do. Praise and gratitude can become a spiritual path, a way out of no way, the only means towards affirmation of what is praise-worthy when none-other is evident. Spiritual practice can be born of suffering like Job’s, which is ultimately not about how great some omnipotent God is, but rather about how the holy can be discovered through blessing what is still possible.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110074752/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_11/05.mp3

The roots of violence: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character,  commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.

This Gandhi quote has haunted me for years, as I’ve wondered: What does it mean to worship with or without sacrifice? Does Unitarian Universalism call for sacrifice? Is it a root of violence if we do not participate in sacrifice?

So, seeking wisdom on the matter, I tried an experiment. First I went to my personal Facebook page, and I asked my wide assortment of associates (the word friends being highly overused)—What is the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? Overwhelmingly, the responses were about having or not having children, doing or not doing things because of the needs of a spouse or family member, paths taken and not taken for reasons other than personal choice. No one mentioned religion of any kind, including Unitarian Universalism, as a source of sacrifice.

Then I went on the “CLF Coffee Hour” Facebook page, where discussions flow on all kinds of topics, and asked, What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made? What motivated you to make it? Do you think Unitarian Universalism demands any kind of sacrifice?

There the conversation got very interesting! Here are some of the things people shared:

• Those of us who came to UU from authoritarian churches had to sacrifice certainty. No longer do we have someone to tell us what we need to believe and constantly reassure us that our doctrines are correct. But when we let go of certainty we open ourselves to seek and find wisdom and inspiration in those traditions we had dismissed as false. So the sacrifice becomes gain rather than loss.
• I feel like UUism has encouraged me to sacrifice easy answers, superficial comfort, and ingrained prejudices. (I don’t know if it has required that of me, but without it, I’m not sure I’m striving towards the principles.) It’s hard work, all this thinking and questioning!
• I would say that UUism has drawn me out of my comfort zone and has caused me to look at the bigger picture and realize that we’ve got to be out in the world to fight for social justice, interact with people and learn new ideas. It is scary at times, since I suffer from panic and anxiety and being gay in a hostile world, but I’m determined to help make a difference.
• When I was young, people told me I had to make sacrifices to achieve success in my life. So I made all the sacrifices, but didn’t get the success I was promised. So now I am very skeptical of anyone who asks me to make a sacrifice.
• We are continually “giving up” something for something else. … sometimes it’s giving up needed change to preserve our ego or comfort. Sometimes it’s giving up our comfort to bring about needed change.

That’s just a sample, and the diversity of responses is compelling, but no one answered “No. UUism does not make me sacrifice anything,” though one person, as you see above, voiced skepticism about being asked to sacrifice after having made futile sacrifices in the past.

As for me, I’m still mulling it about. It’s always easy to compare what I do with what other people do and come up feeling that I have made no sacrifices in my life, or to compare myself with others and believe that I have. But I don’t think sacrifice is a competitive sport. And what sacrifice means is subjective. Over and over, when I exclaim about what I perceive as a huge sacrifice someone else has made, I’m told that for them it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all!

When I was a UU kid and the Catholic kids I knew were giving up something for Lent—usually candy—I know that some part of me wanted to join them, despite my love for candy. When my own child grew up with Muslim friends and learned they were fasting for Ramadan, there was an immediate impulse to fast with them, to join them. I think that sacrificing in solidarity—not competitively, not to one-up someone else’s sacrifice or to have sacrifice bragging rights—can be immensely satisfying. Whereas sacrificing when others are not can be immensely infuriating.

I still wonder what Gandhi specifically meant—he who lived in poverty when he could have been rich, who gave his very life for the freedom of his people. I’m pretty sure that our UU religion does call us to some kinds of sacrifice—giving up certainty, giving up easy answers, giving up the comfort of old assumptions and prejudices that do harm to others. And it also calls us to work against the ways that our society seems all too willing to sacrifice the needs of some people in exchange for the comfort of others. I don’t know whether that counts as worship without sacrifice or not, but I’m willing to live inside of that complexity

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063359/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/04.mp3

Some identities, like being a student or a resident in a particular place, come and go. Others are with you for life. Still others you find yourself easing into and becoming more and more familiar with. For me, right now, aging is one of those gradual ones I find myself thinking more about. I’m in my 60s now. People in their 60s used to be old in my mind—but I find that the word “old” really tends to mean people who are older than I am. It’s not a fixed identity. Suddenly 60s seem like the prime of life!

I hated turning 50. My women friends wanted me to have a croning ceremony, but that was annoying to me. I adopted a child at 40 and I was tired of people thinking I was the grandmother. At the urging of a friend who insisted I should have some kind of ritual, I honored the date in the most honest way I could: I gathered a circle of friends and then climbed under a table with a   tablecloth over it and said, “I don’t want to be 50! Tell me why I should come out!” Friends in their 50s then began to tell me what they liked about it—the increased confidence, the sense of not worrying so much about what other people thought. Finally, bored and sweaty, I emerged, still ambivalent but willing to face facts (and some late arrivers who looked stunned to have walked in on the middle of this).

I had no such difficulty turning 60. Rather, I felt invigorated and excited about it. For one thing, there were discounts attached to the number, and I’m cheap. For another thing, my kid was pretty much grown up and avoiding me anyway, so no one thought we were related at all on a daily basis, and so I wasn’t hearing all those grandma comments.

And I’ve loved my 60s. The confidence remains, and the sense of having nothing left to prove. There is an ease and self-acceptance which is a blessing I wish I could have received earlier, about everything from my body to my inevitable blunders and errors.

But being old…this is kind of a new identity that’s creeping up on me, and it seems to be getting stronger. For one thing, no one is left in my family who is older than me. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents—no one of the older generations serves as a barrier between me and death. For another thing, conversation at parties and social gatherings among my longtime friends is beginning to turn to their retirement plans.  Things like Medicare and Social Security are no longer just social issues, but rather are practical topics, as people compare and contrast options and plans. And, then there’s the matter of my body, which is no longer remotely drawn to late night dances or parties or even movies. Sleepy now, thank you very much.

And I’m beginning to wonder and fantasize about my next stage of life. Growing old is an exciting prospect to me because I have great role models for it. Though my mother died ridiculously young from ovarian cancer, my grandmother lived to 106 and enjoyed every minute of it. She eloped at 76, and promptly bought a trailer truck with her new love and hit the road. She continued to travel into her 90s, and planted gardens and got a 30-year mortgage at 82. (She had temporarily moved into a retirement home but found the people there politically incompatible.) She wrote fiery letters to the editor and otherwise behaved in ways I intend to imitate. When she turned 105, she said sadly to me, “Oh, to be 100 again!”

I was reminded of her recently talking to longtime CLF member Jeanne Beatty, who lives up in Alberta, Canada. At 98, Jeanne has been a member of CLF for 50 years. When I told Jeanne I’d be camping in Jasper Park this summer, she said it was only about 4 hours from where she lives and she’d drive over to see me. I was taken aback. “But Jeanne,” I said, “you can’t camp at 98!” “Why not?” she demanded. “I’ve got it on my calendar!” We’ll see if it works out, but I love her spirit!

With great role models like Jeanne and so many of you, “old age” becomes something to look forward to. But not for everyone. I was talking recently with another friend who, at 95, said he wants only to die. He said he’s not in pain, just tired, and he feels like “a waste of space.” I will admit that this upset me. My immediate, blurted out, response clearly surprised him. “I didn’t know you were that much of a capitalist!” I said. “Like you’re only valuable because of what you produce? I thought you knew better than that! You’re valuable because so many of us love you!” He laughed and said he didn’t believe me, but that it was a kind thing to say.

But I wasn’t kidding; I meant it. I love that man dearly, and his loss on the planet will be a sad day for me. Still, I know that the death of his wife and other beloved friends has left him feeling alone. I hear from many of you about the loss of your “other half” and I know that the blow this deals is immeasurable. And aging, grief and loss do seem to come as a package deal.

And yet, my grandmother, and Jeanne, and so many of you inspire me about the possibilities of old age precisely because despite so much loss all around you, you find new ways to love and be loved, new people and places and relationships. I can only hope that I embrace my old age with a fraction of the zeal you show for it.

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_06/04.mp3

“You were ravenous right from birth!” This is the story I was told through my whole childhood. It puzzled me as I began to spend time with babies, because it seemed to me that when they were hungry, all of them were ravenous. Which is to say that they turned purple and screamed till they were fed. And then they calmed down.

I don’t remember my babyhood, but I do remember a very complicated relationship with food and hunger from earliest childhood. When my parents told me that I was ravenous from birth, it always felt laced with shame and judgment. This, I think, was because of two factors—one, my gender, and two, more essentially, that I was always chubby. When I was young, just a little chubby. As I aged, and largely due to dieting and external controls on food, chubbiness turned to obesity.

As someone who has lived with “weight issues” my whole life, hunger is a complicated thing to talk about. I grew up in a household where there was enough food and we did not worry about where the next meal would come from, so there was never a question of physical hunger. Someone I know who had to live with hunger describes it thus: “I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t keep my energy up…at times I remember thinking about what it would be like to die of
starvation.”

This was never my experience, and I know from others who lived with it that the trauma that comes from genuine hunger, especially in childhood, never goes completely away, no matter how circumstances change. My experience was that there was food around, plenty of food, but that I was not supposed to eat it. That I was bad if I ate it. This led to a different kind of hunger, to a distrust of what my own body wanted and needed and an externalization of how I thought I “should” eat. That kind of hunger led to secret eating, shame about eating, and a sense that my hunger was insatiable.

Beginning when I was about seven or eight, and family photos show me on the chubby side of being normally sized, my parents locked the food in a closet. There was food in the refrigerator—things like condiments and leftovers—but other than that, food was impossible to get unless it was served. Mealtimes, however, were fraught with anxiety. We had to “clean up our plates,” whether we liked the food or hated it. Many nights ended with my father sitting at the kitchen table glowering at me while I sat defiantly by a half-eaten vegetable or half-drunk glass of milk, watching the hours tick away until bedtime. At breakfast, the same food, which had been on the table all night, would be served up as breakfast.

There is an insatiable hunger that arises from being out of sync with your own body, with your own rhythms and needs, likes and dislikes. Other female friends have told me how shame and hunger interacted for them, and I’ve heard a huge variety of stories about women told they were too thin, too fat, or simply hungry when they shouldn’t be—who also felt shamed about hunger or lack of hunger. I did not ask other genders but I suspect they also have complicated narratives to share. Thirty percent of the American people are obese. Depending on which study you believe, between 30 and 75% of American women have eating disorders of one kind of another. These numbers correlate, I think, to the quantity of processed food we consume, but also to some deeper hungers which are not being honored or addressed.

By now, I have engaged in so many forms of controlling what I eat that I couldn’t even begin to list them all. Diets, “food plans,” restrictions from certain processed foods, call them what you want. What I notice is that the times I am in best relationship with food and with my body are when I am eating with people I care about and we are eating food prepared with love and care, living a life where I am engaged with and connected to others.

I can’t get my childhood back, or re-do the shaming messages that permeated my relationship with food and hunger and my body. What I can do is refuse to pass that shame and judgment on to others. I refuse to judge anyone’s appetites or choices, to presume that I know what anyone else needs for their own body, to dictate when or what other people should eat. I refuse to participate in the shaming of anyone about their body or their appetite (or lack of appetite).

And I celebrate good food with friends and family, paying attention to how food makes me feel and honoring those feelings, trusting my own body. For me, it’s been the work of a lifetime, but I am grateful to have made some amount of peace with myself about it.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110004705/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_05/04.mp3

When I was a kid, it seemed like magic. My mother would take a piece of fabric and somehow bewitch it, so that it became a shirt, or a pair of shorts, or a dress for me to wear. Flat, lifeless pieces of cloth in a drawer, and suddenly—voila! A piece of new clothing!

I asked my mom about it, and she told me to watch her. She took pieces of paper and pinned them to the fabric and cut them out. Then, following a huge sheet of directions with pictures, she sewed them together in particular ways. And plain old cloth became a beautiful new garment to wear.

It was amazing to watch, but I remember as the magic fell away. There was disappointment, but also a way forward. Suddenly, I knew how to move from cloth to garment, and none of it was mysterious at all. Some people do the same thing with words, with images, with food. They create something that, to the untrained eye, appears to have been conjured from stardust and mystery. But actually they are doing it methodically, step by step, following written instructions, or the teachings of their ancestors, or a particular gift that lets them do it intuitively.

Which is how we need to go about making change in the world. Methodically. I was taught history as if it were full of magic—benign acts by which people in authority handed over power to those without it. But watching and listening and reading history has taught me that the words of Frederick Douglass are true: “Power cedes   nothing without demand.” Ceaseless demand.

I study the patterns, the templates, the instructions built by people who have demanded and achieved a shifting of power. I am alert when anyone succeeds in creating something new and life-giving.

After yet another horrific school shooting—this time in Parkland, Florida—young people demanded change. Mainstream media was in awe of the mysterious, magical power that the students had to actually convince corporations and politicians to change their policies.

And yet, further learning said that this was not completely mysterious. These were young people fortified with information gained in Advanced Placement history class about how discussion had previously been stopped in the aftermath of shootings. Gun control had been a subject of a year’s worth of debate for some of them.

Others were theater students, well-practiced at speaking before large crowds. The pieces of what they were doing were not magical or mysterious, but rather specific and well-honed. So much so that detractors accused them of being paid by left wing sources to fake their emotional states.

These young people also got boosts from celebrities, and from mainstream media that could not gush enough about their talent and their heroism.

Making change is not easy for anyone, and my hat is off to these young people. However, watching the assists that they have received, the open doors to power, the millions of dollars amassed to help them with their work, I’ve also noticed a sharp contrast to how the grief and anger of other young people has been met recently.

When Michael Brown’s murdered body was left lying in the hot streets of Ferguson, Missouri for four and a half hours before being tended to, his community, like the community of Parkland, was both angry and deeply grief-stricken. When the people came to mourn their beloved, to hold a vigil, they were met with tanks and militarized police. Mainstream (white) media labeled the protestors as dangerous and violent, when in fact the vast majority of them were grieving neighbors and peers. The scene escalated, and many people and businesses were hurt.

#BlackLivesMatter (BLM) emerged as a powerful, visionary force of collective liberation. These mostly young, mostly women and queer folks pieced together their own pattern for change, for creating a different way of being. Indeed, much of what the Parkland students have done is crafted on the techniques of BLM: create your own video and send it out via social media rather than relying on other sources; use many voices rather than electing one leader to represent the group; speak truth to power.

And yet the young people involved with BLM were not seen as heroes or visionary leaders. They were criminalized and judged and violently assaulted in cities across our land. Some are in jail still. Nonetheless, their work has had a positive impact on many communities across the land.

I am grateful for all people, especially the young, who dare to believe that we can still co-create the world; who can see the world we live in now and somehow find a way to imagine shaping something new from it; who take whatever tools are at hand and, with or without approval or support from others, use them to make something new.

Now that I’m older, I can also see that such leaders, such movements, such moments, are not to be taken for granted. That, in fact, when they happen—when groups are greater than the sum of their parts, when the walls crack enough for new life to come through—there is perhaps a bit of magic going on after all. Method…and magic.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211109013259/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_09/04.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108230123/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_06/05.mp3

Attached media: https://media.blubrry.com/clf_quest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_03/04.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108152645/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/17_11/05.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108093523/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/17_06/04.mp3