on the exhale
For weeks, I have been holding my breath, waiting for this school year to close. Summer’s welcome reprieve is especially sweet this year. It has been an emotional ride and as I look around and see all of us still standing, I am grateful. I think I might be able to breathe.
As I waited for the 8th Grade Graduation to start last night, I was reading an article by David Servan Schreiber on handling stress. The timing was perfect. Except that the message was tough. Schreiber is a French psychiatrist and a regular contribute to Ode, the magazine that I was reading. The title of his book, “Healing without Freud or Prozac” gives a hint about his biases and the articles I have read by Schreiber have been profound in their simplicity. If only simplicity were easy.
Schreiber challenges our vacation-focused culture as being a bulimic approach to stress management. We learn to expand our psychic stomachs to hold inordinate amounts of stress, holding our breath until the next vacation when we can release. Binge and purge. The problem, of course, is that a lifetime of stress with a couple escape valves leads to any number of health concerns. In other words, it doesn’t work.
Freud and Prozac have a place in helping us to manage the expanded psyche between purges, but Schreiber suggests something more basic and accessible. Breathing. Listening to our body as it begins to tense, to listen to our breathing, and choose a happy memory to place in our mind. This wisdom, of course, is what our parish nurse, Lisa, has been working with as she publishes weekly “relaxation techniques”. I read them, I use them, and I find myself looking for that piece in the bulletin each week. Breathe in, breathe out.
As I sit in the auditorium awash with feelings, I wonder not at the truth of Schreiber’s words but of the possibility. In a world where storms topple school buildings filled with children, where widowed mothers struggle with cancer, where children face nightmares that don’t stay in their closets… in this world I am sometimes afraid to breathe.
When hurts swells in my chest, my diaphragm has little room to expand. How do I disentangle the fingers of anxiety that clutch at my throat? Where do store the potted plant of my own self-loathing?
Prozac and Freud are both looking pretty good in light of chronic sadness and major anxiety. Both have a place on the shelves of healing tools. But after months of holding my breath, the oxygen coming into my lungs is intoxicating. The bulimic pattern of our stress management routines is overrated. The beauty of breath far surpasses the strength of character demonstrated while withholding it.
Of course, on this first day of summer vacation, I am undoubtedly reveling in the purge. The real challenge, of course, comes at the end of August. But for today, I am grateful for breath.
ancient promises and modern heresy
My church history professor warned us to be cautious of history textbooks, for the victors get to write the “official” version. To understand the whole story, she pushed; we would do well to read from the margins. She invited us to dig in the trenches and climb the poles of heresy for a better view of the world.
Life lived in the margins, however, can itself obstruct the view. My own poles of heresy at the moment keep me stretched between adolescent drama and the Obama-Clinton show down. Admittedly, I almost missed the historic birthday celebrations in Jerusalem last week.
In a world where friends are few, President Bush attended the celebration and assured the Knesset that the United States is Israel’s “best friend”. Given that both governments have outdone themselves in their abilities to create enemies, I suppose the “bff” designation is at least practical. As we encourage each other in the building of bigger walls, skilled weaponry, and the embrace of coercive interrogation, it may be true that we deserve each other. The ‘best friend’ language, however, is a guile intimation of childlike innocence.
Ridiculous becomes dangerous when we paint God’s name on our blessing. In reference to the founding of the nation state of Israel, President Bush said that it was, “more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David — a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.”
To be sure, Abraham’s children told their children that God promised the land on which they stood to them in much the same way that the children of the Mayflower Pilgrims told theirs. Handily Bush invoked this echo as he quoted from William Bradford, “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.”
I have no doubt that Abraham, Bradford, and Bush claim God’s sanction on their land grabs. My concern is when we confuse their claim with God’s. Frankly, I am more likely to be moved by Ishmael’s hearing of God, or even Isaac’s than Abraham’s. Those who have been tied to the altar are much more likely to be listening for God’s compassion than those accustomed to wielding the sword.
Manifest destiny appears to be a gift from God if read from the perspective of the European settlers. The Native American version of that same chapter, however, gives God no credit for the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee. This should serve as a cautionary note when we are tempted to put God’s name on our deeds.
In the face of the unrelenting genocides of the past century, I am loathe to cast stones towards any particular peoples struggling to defend a homeland. When it comes to Jerusalem, there are legitimate and competing claims. In the least, we whose European ancestors used God’s name to take Native American lands ought to leave God’s name off our rhetoric.
And who knows? Maybe refraining from putting God’s name on our claims might help as we manage the heresies closer to home.
you have heard it said
Note: Revisiting Matthew’s remembrance of Jesus’ teaching on the law (Matthew 5), I was pondering what the parallels would be in our modern discourse. He named the legalism of the day, and then pushed beyond the legalism to the heart of the matter. Using a (preachable!) call-response motif, he was able to apparently embrace the law but challenge the hearers to a much more compelling (if difficult) response. Borrowing from this tradition, I began to wonder what Jesus might say about the legalisms of our day, the “wedge issues”. The following quotes were shared with our congregation (8:30am, 27 Apr 08) and then in a presentation to the Women’s Interfaith Conference of St. Louis (08 May 08).
You have heard it said, “You shall not kill unborn babies.”
But Jesus might say to us:
You shall not put women and children in positions of vulnerability,
economically and socially,
such that life is not welcomed and cherished.
You have heard it said that you shall not engage in homosexual affairs.
But Jesus might say to us:
You shall not close your minds or hearts to the possibilities
of loving and respectful covenants for yourself or others
that move beyond culturally defined norms.
You shall not limit liturgical celebrations nor define relationships
in ways that push people into closets and dark bars.
You have heard it said, “You shall have prayer in public schools.”
But Jesus might say to us:
You shall not implicitly or explicitly show preference
for any particular practice of prayer
such that would discourage any other practices.
personal piety and global despair
While I was parked on CNN.com last Tuesday waiting for Lake County, Indiana to post their results, the people of Myanmar had just begun to count their dead.
As I sat between the surreal story of tens of thousands of people destroyed and the nail biting politics closer to home, I found myself noticing a tab on the page called “issues”. I clicked and discovered that the issues of this election year are, again, abortion, same gender marriage, guns, and stem cell research. The economy, immigrants, Iran and Iraq also appear, but the dominant concerns are clearly ones of personal piety. Me and mine.
While we squabble about issues of personal morality, tens of thousands of people whose lives were already tenuous have now been literally washed away. The hundreds of thousands who survived the storm are now perishing in the devastation that remains. Pouring salt on the wound is the bitter reality that even as the world wakes to the sound of crisis, the government of Myanmar has already expressed reluctance to open its closed doors. Although a lover of irony, the tragic proportions of this irony are haunting.
Public media can be misleading but in the case of what captures our American interest they seem to be sadly on point.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s office (conveniently found at www.sos.mo.gov) lists the ballot initiatives now circulating in our state. The list is not dissimilar from that at CNN.com and includes abortion, affirmative action, and stem cell research. And though there are a couple of initiatives dealing with more communal issues (renewable energy and health care), the only initiative on the approved list thus far is one limiting our official discourse to English.
Similarly the Christian Coalition announces that the seven political issues facing people of faith are: “conservative” judges, limiting stem cell research, protecting tax cuts, ensuring ‘Christian’ access to the internet, banning non-heterosexual marriage, and protecting Christians in the military.
All of these issues are worthy of our consideration and perhaps our vote, but none of these address the gross inequities of the distribution of wealth (and food) in our world that have rendered the people of Myanmar unable to cope with the devastating cyclone.
We ‘invest’ millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in fact, to debate sound bites and defend personal piety while entire regions of the world are without food and subjugated to the desperation of the most vicious junta.
The fiery words from the prophet Amos (ch 4-6) echo in my mind:
Woe to you “cows of Bashan” who “lie on your ivory beds” while the “widows and orphans starve”.
Of course, such teaching is deemed a distraction and can quickly earn a public roast. If we learned nothing else from Jeremiah Wright, certainly we learned the importance of sticking to issues of personal piety and not questioning the balance of wealth and power. If only our still speaking God wasn’t.
