love-your-neighbor

Say Yes

The music was culminating to its purpose, to the moment of decision, to a crossroads. I sat in the local theater with friends on either side of me, popcorn long cast aside, tears welling as we watched the two witches from Wicked on the screen make their lifelong decision. If you are aware of the Wizard of Oz, you are well aware that these two witches do not team up– that their fate is to be apart, and tragically opposed. But in that moment of the movie as I leaned forward in my seat and the future Wicked Witch of the West extended an invitation to Glinda the Good to join her in her fight against injustice– though I had seen the show on stage four times and know what happens even if I hadn’t seen Wizard of Oz a thousand times as a kid– I held my breath.

“Come with me,” she says.

And in the pause, I heard it. In the back of the theater, a small fervent voice called out to the screen–

“Say YES!”

It rattled the lump in my throat and I cried then. Because I know the story. Because seconds later, Glinda says “no.”

But mostly because for a split second, there was the commandment of a small person calling into the same old story that there could be another ending.

Say YES!

This is the voice of hope that haunts me now.

The temperature in New Hampshire this week has not exceeded 30 degrees. We managed a white Christmas and a wintry dreamscape worthy of the December picture on a wall calendar. Last Saturday, we gathered with our community across the river in Vermont on Solstice Day before dark, and caroled around the neighborhood to nursing home facilities and to the homes of people shut-in due to illness, age, or heartache.

We finished the trail at Rowe & Laurie’s home, where they had prepared three kinds of soup and a spread of snacks that were quickly raised to higher tables when Poppy the golden lab arrived with John & Carolyn. The temperature was 8 degrees, but the home was warm with a wood stove, and soon everyone removed their layers and boots and still had rosy cheeks from the heat. Emmy & Rick read a solstice poem after the last guest arrived, and together we sang a rewrite of O Holy Night that I’d penned to be Solstice themed. We talked of the significance of the darkest day, of remembering that it only gets lighter from here– and that while the light in itself is hopeful, the greater hope is that on the longest night of the year, we have gathered with others to make sure we are all okay.

And we were all okay.

When it was time to go, I began bracing myself for the outdoors, calculating what drop in temperature may have already taken place in the couple of hours we’d spent here. I shivered a bit as I put on my boots and said offhandedly to Catherine, “Oh, it’s cold out there.”

And Catherine smiled and said, “Yes, it’s wonderful. With the way the world is heating up, I am always so grateful for a good, cold day. I just welcome it.”

Say yes, I thought.

We know how the story is going. We know that the polar bears are dying and the people of Greenland are worried that the ice will soon be so far melted that they can no longer live there and survive as they have for centuries. We know we are well past the point of reversal, that the wildfire smoke is a new season as winter used to be. But on these freezing nights, Catherine is not thinking of her inconvenience of heavy coats and layers and boots, she is calling into the story with glasses fogging from her breath–

Say YES.

I entered the night with a deep breath. The iciness hit my lungs, and I pulled the air in deeper. Then I calculated the ways in which I have done a poor job recycling this year. I could do better. I will. It would not reverse the story of our climate any more than gathering with loved ones on the 21st of December will bring the light any sooner. But if I say yes, I could at least find a little good, and a little more comfort for the people around me. It could lead to hope.

What I learned this season is that while Solstice celebrators seemed to bring joy to the world, Christmas only brings the cranks. The Solstice rewrite of O Holy Night went up on to the internet as a small welcome to the season, and was primarily met with tidings of comfort and joy.

And then, as the internet is Pandora’s Box, in came an onslaught of frightened people who called my Someone and I blasphemers, new age garbage, and “woke at its worst.” We closed our eyes and imagined our younger selves, who may have also sided with this perspective. We attempted to rationalize, encouraging them to be kind, take a breath, and perhaps remember that this is more about them than it is about us. I minded my tone, and recognized that theological and ideological debates feed the ego, but rarely feed the hungry. And that’s when I realized– Christmas is not at war with Solstice. People are at war with themselves.

Because Christmas at its Christian formation was a holiday about Saying Yes. It is about making room for the unexpected, making space for the stranger, making a literal room at the inn for people who are showing up at your door unannounced. It is about Saying “Yes, please take what is mine and make it yours.”

It is about Saying, “Yes, there is no mine and yours.”

And for this reason, people will find a way to feed their ideas of scarcity– pouncing on folk singers for taking “their” songs instead of taking that bundle of Christmas gift money and donating it a local shelter. Defending their nostalgia for a song in the name of God gives an untouchable righteousness unmatched by holiday cheer– and certainly avoids the risk of Saying Yes to what their chosen holiday actually means.

Welcome the stranger.

Say Yes.

And in this way, I found more empathy– mildly tempered with my own self-righteousness, certainly. But I’m working on Saying, “Yes, I hear that this song is important to you. Yes, you are welcome here anyway. Yes, you are loved when you are unable to love. Yes, come with me, come along, we could change this together.”

I know how the story goes. But I can still hope.

After the movie, Annie and I headed to the bathrooms and waited in line. I told her about the small voice I heard in the theater at the crucial moment. She took a deep breath and teared up.

“That’s just amazing,” she said, “because we all know how the story goes.”

I did know, especially for Annie. She and her spouse have been hurt in immeasurable ways by their former church communities in the last couple of years. Some of their closest friends have abandoned them for safer ideas about who is “in” and who is not.

“For me,” Annie continued, “it makes me hopeful, because I would just assume that your friends are going to tell you ‘no,’ that they aren’t going to come with you.”

I was struck at this moment, toilets flushing in the background, the smell of stale popcorn in the air, that Annie was more hopeful than she realized. For the week, she and her spouse spent the night in our home. While we were friends who met once a year for work, we weren’t close friends. And in the midst of complete relational desolation, she had taken my invitation to come. The week had been in every way perfect– the conversation, the shared food, the unfettering of our hearts. She had no reason to trust me when I said, “Come with me.” But she said yes. And it had been worth it. I didn’t know how to explain this to her– that her unbeknownst healing had also healed me.

So instead, I just repeated, “Say yes.”

“Say yes,” she said back to me.

And in this case, the story changed.

The Great Experiment

“Love Trump, too?” Chris asked me backstage in the green room. “Trump, too?” he persisted before I had a chance to answer.

“Well, it would appear so,” I responded slowly. It seems I’d pigeonholed myself here. My Someone and I have been performing a song for the last couple of months in front of a myriad of people titled “Love Them, Too,” and the concept is as direct as the title. Mostly, it has highlighted our failings in the department of Loving Thy Neighbor. It has also created a small confession booth following our shows, of audience members approaching us and delivering their list of who in their life is impossible to love. Not with excuse– just as a fact. But the question Chris pushed back to me wasn’t something I hadn’t asked myself. It was a question I didn’t expect from someone else. And I was unprepared to give a definitive answer. What does it mean to love someone? What is my definition of love? What is his?

So, I got quiet, and Chris did, too. And we let that be an answer enough as he picked up his guitar and headed to the stage for his set.

We are one month since the election, and an entire season has passed. I have a whole journal full of my thoughts on the matter that don’t all that much matter. It is not that I am becoming despondent. It is that I am becoming water. It will come as little to no surprise that the results were not what I’d voted for, not what I’d hoped. The morning after Election Day, I did not try to fight reality like the first time. Instead, I asked my Someone for a cup of coffee, of which he promptly made and brought back to bed. And we sat and we watched the leaves dying outside of our bedroom window and we waited. We waited for the news to sink in. We waited for our feelings to settle. We waited for an answer of the next right thing. We waited for the sign that it was time to get out of bed.

And that is when I knew I would become water.

The first time around, I suffered. I checked my newsfeed chronically, I worried aloud with my friends, I posted snarky things on the internet, I called people names.

“I will not suffer this time,” I told my Someone. “We will not suffer this time.”

“Okay,” he agreed.

“Nothing we did worked before, and we can’t do it again. We will get hurt– things will hurt us– but we do not have to suffer.”

“Okay.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” I asked.

“If it doesn’t work, we can go back to staring at our phones and being irrationally angry with everyone,” he said.

My phone dinged. It was Alice. She worried about getting the medication she’d need for the next few years to maintain her health, and to continue her life as a woman.

Then it was fellow musician friends– “Are you okay?”

I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath.

“Instead, I will become water. I will travel quietly and naturally to the lowest places. I will go to the darkest depths and I will wait there. And as I wait, it will erode; and when it erodes, and new path will form and we will all find a new way out.”

“We will become water,” he repeated.

We would become water, and we would begin The Great Experiment: to love our neighbors.

It was time to get out of bed.

This is what I know to be true: that to call someone my enemy is to take away a small part of their humanity. And when I take a small part of their humanity, I care less about what happens to them. When I care less about what happens to them– when my ill-wishes become personally justified– I become a little less human, too.

So why do I do it? Why do I call someone names, or doom scroll for sarcastic memes, or preoccupy my mind with all the reasons that the “other side” is wrong? Or even preoccupy myself with their being “the other side?” Because it makes me right. The second I step from the ledge of fighting for someone to fighting against someone else, I can feel good about myself. Calling someone a Nazi makes me not a Nazi– which, in recent history, should be a sign of virtue. Calling someone an asshole when they cut me off in traffic means that I am a good driver. It feeds my ego. It makes me self righteous. I am justified because I am right. This, too, makes me not only the judge, but also the bringer of justice. I lay on my horn (he deserved it). I call someone a Big Orange Monster (well, it’s true). And how do I feel afterward?

A little empty. But for a second, I was right. And that felt good. So I do it again. Repeat repeat repeat until my ego is thoroughly protected in a bubble of righteous indignation that can neither hear nor see the small destructive path I am creating behind me in the name of justice. Which requires more evidence for the narrative of my rightness. Now, everything I see becomes a dichotomy of are-you-with-me-or-are-you-an-ignorant-traitor.

Don’t get me wrong– anger is good. Anger can bring clarity, and clarity can bring action. Note– action. Not reaction. That I become water and swell in a storm of anger may clear the space I need to see where I will flow next. Eventually, the storm must end. And then, I must reckon with settling again to the lowest places and waiting. Gently eroding, and waiting.

The day after Election Day, we put our feet on our floor to begin The Great Experiment. Fortunately, our friends Rowe & Laurie were coming over for coffee on the porch to help us decide what it meant. The weather was improbably perfect– overcast, gloomy, and a little warm. We talked about becoming water. We talked about not judging our circumstances by this particular moment in time. We practiced saying, “Maybe so.”

“Democracy is crumbling.”

“Maybe so.”

“It’ll work out.”

“Maybe so.”

“I am afraid for my friends.”

“Me, too.”

It was not indifference. It was not denying reality. It was simply not suffering. We told them about The Great Experiment– that we would love our neighbors.

“There is a way we could do it,” Laurie said, ever putting practice to parable, “We can start by drawing a small circle around ourselves and asking– ‘Is everything okay in here?’ and if the answer is ‘yes,’ then we make a bigger circle and ask again. When we get to a circle where someone is not okay, we stop and help and start drawing circles again. It’s what we could do.”

I could imagine it perfectly. I looked around the table. Laurie had lost her mother, Rosy, just a couple days before. Rosy was a cherished part of their home for a couple of years, and a cherished part of Laurie’s entire life. I drew a circle around us and asked myself, “Is everyone okay in here?” I noted the deep grief behind Laurie’s tired face and turned to my Someone, “I think we need another round of lattes for the table.” And so we stayed a little longer to visit until everyone was ready to stand up again.

The remainder of the day I drew circles around us. When a low spot formed in that circle, like water, I flowed that way. I tidied. I walked my dogs. Then, I drew a circle around my property. The gardens needed putting to bed. My Someone and I flowed to them and trimmed the raspberry bushes and the Asiatic Lilies, cut back the Aster, mulched the leaves and placed them on the beds, pushed ginseng seeds down into soil and firmly covered them again. As we pushed down our last seed, the sky opened up and it poured. I watched from the porch as the water fell and traveled to where the seeds were planted, and dribbled low to prepare them for their future growth.

I didn’t tell the water what to do. I didn’t force it. Instead, I repotted my houseplants and let the rain from the eves of the porch water them in their bigger pots. Then I carried them inside, confident the rain would do its job just fine without me watching. I drew another circle and found that everything and everyone in my circle was okay. I drew a bigger circle. Annie was afraid. I flowed to her. Our touring friends were scheduled to play a show in a place that was morally and politically opposed to them– I sat down and breathed deeply and flowed to them over text.

I found that my friends were drawing circles, too, and that I was inside of them. I assured them my oxygen mask was on, and asked if theirs was, too. Janelle wrote– “From the top down, it seems we are in a lot of trouble. So we need to be an encouragement from the ground up.”

Janelle was also becoming water. I was happy to be sitting alongside her, waiting and eroding and making a new path. It’s no small thing to draw a circle around only yourself and to make sure you are okay. Inner peace isn’t just necessary. It becomes contagious.

“Love Trump, too? Trump, too?”

The urgency of Chris’ voice still socks me in the forehead. I flinch when I hear it replayed. I can say this– I am trying. My circle, maybe, has not yet been drawn that wide. But I know this– when I saw the news come in earlier this year that he had been shot in the Pennsylvania town next to mine growing up, a deep, irrepressible phrase bubbled from my mouth–

“Not like this. Not like this. We don’t want this.”

Violence will only beget violence. Hatred with hatred. That was the moment, for the first time, that I realized I was capable of a love much bigger than myself. And that it was much harder, much more work, than being right. So from the bottom up, I am waiting. I am widening my circle to include my mother. Here, I have had to stop and investigate. Everything here does not feel okay. And so I recognize that– though she herself may identify as her political affiliation, it is not who she really is. I remind myself that she is also a person who texts my niece every day before school with three emojis on our family thread that describe what her day will be like. Loving her is no small task, because contrary to popular belief, love is not blind. Love is eyes wide open with a smidge of mirror tucked in. Love is water– it waits, it erodes what is unnecessary slowly, and all the while requiring us to look back at ourselves as we do. And then we draw another circle.