Why I'm not exactly sure, but on New Year's Eve, this Millennium-crazed New Year's Eve, I didn't want to be amid revelry, amid a high decibel proclamation that this was a turning point in the life of our planet. On the morning of December 31st, my husband and I drove up to the Berkshires to the farm of some old friends from seminary who had invited us for the weekend. We knew there would be neighbors and other friends beside ourselves assembling that night to celebrate. I suppose I could call it a party if pushed. What I really wanted though was to step outside that night into some star-glimmering assurance that there was more, so much more, than my world. Just after midnight, I went out the back door, away from banter of conversation and calypso music, away from any notion that humanity was turning a corner. And it didn't take much, just a few moments near the warmth of a bonfire on a hill far removed from any sense of shelter. A few moments of eternity was all I wanted. And I was graced with timeless time, spaceless space.
What I hadn't counted on that starry night was the epiphany I carried with me from the farmhouse. It came to me recently bound under the title, "A Homespun Anthology of Collects for the Day," January 1, 2000. I opened it and was once again drawn in:
"Late on New Year's Eve at the Farm those gathered here stood in a circle of quietness around the table bearing the foods of our last supper of the century....In this momentarily quiet context the following Collect from Sally Munley of Chicago was read by... Jan Carlsson-Bull of All Souls Church, New York City. Jan had known Sally in Manhattan in the early 1960's, and both have been friends of he farm for nearly 40 years. The Collect seemed right for all of us--particularly [for the] children [present] whose lives will most likely span most of the next century."
'Dear Jim:' Sally had written to our host. 'In reflecting on a theme for the new millennium, I come to the word 'Simplicity.' My father just celebrated with us his 100th Christmas, having lived through this entire past century. His life is now reduced to a few clothes to wear, food to eat, seeing some family members, rides in the car, and memories of a good life. He is content.'
She added this prayer:
'Lord,
Help me be content with the basic simplicity of life,
Not wanting more than I need, and
Always grateful for my wonderful family and friends,
For the beauty of your creation around me, and
For your grace and love.
Amen.'
A few weeks into the year 2000 I took that experience and my political consciousness and headed west to my native state of Iowa. The Iowa presidential caucus was imminent and I was determined to do my part on behalf of the candidate I deemed best for the job. Now a word about Iowa. Most of you know that Iowa is no longer part of that territory known as the Louisiana Purchase, but for a few intrepid New Yorkers, this may be news. A few of you know that Iowa is not Ohio is not Idaho. Forrest comes from Idaho. I come from Iowa. Much as we love our native states, perhaps we considered our respective departures as our human response to being alive and knowing that we needed New York.
Now I spent five days in the very real state of Iowa, in meetings--nothing new there--and in conversations in schools and libraries and living rooms and around the kitchen tables of familiar farmhouses I hadn't visited for decades. I guess I was in more farmhouses in January than in the past 30 years altogether! One of those dwellings was set on the proverbial thousand acres that had been in the family for generations. My visit was a bit serendipitous. I hadn't known until that morning whether I would have time to squeeze a visit to my cousins into an already tight schedule. When I called to find out if they were even home, the response was immediate: "Of course you'll be here for lunch!"
Around noon I pulled into the Beckers' farm. There were generous smiles and more generous hugs and the inevitable updates about who was doing what, how my mother was faring, the ages and inclinations of my daughters. Through the course of lunch, we meandered into the topic of farming in 21st century Iowa. At this point, I mostly listened. The farming they were doing had diminished to a fraction of the activity on those acres barely twenty years before. Corporate farming was taking its toll on these people of the heartland. Corporate hog farming, for example, functions with hyper-efficiency to produce lean pork for the marketplace and a profit margin that family farmers never dreamt of. The fallout? The demise of family farming, the faded identity of women and men whose very souls were soil-bound, a growing gap between rich and poor that mirrors the worst of urban life and marches to the rhythms of a booming economy, and the reality of hog waste that renders fresh air extinct and the underground water supply, increasingly unfit for human consumption. "So," I queried, "that's what all those road signs are about, the ones that read: 'Murphy hogs, go home!" "Yep," they replied. The frustration and futility in their voices were tempered by their account of the blessings they enjoyed: plenty of food, a roof over their heads, and enough children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to fill a large pickup truck--maybe two.
As the sun began to dip, we hugged our good-byes, and I set off on the 50-mile drive to the home of my Uncle Ray, an 85-year-old retired farmer. The following morning I had another campaign meeting in the next town, but I was squeezing as much family time into this visit as I possibly could. I was driving due west along one of those two-laners. The temperature was falling, but I opened the window just enough to afford a few more degrees of intimacy with the soil-rich stretches of this landscape.
Once again I knew a profound sense of connection to the land and to the necessary patience it suggested, patience to sow and till and harvest pretty much in accord with the cycles of nature. For no apparent reason, I glanced south. I stopped the car, reached for my camera and framed what my heart's eye had already taken in....the hilltop silhouette of an abandoned barn, an empty corncrib, and a windmill, with its wheel nodding earthward, as if contemplating the spare beauty of the earth itself, with its occasional clumps of frozen snow picking up the late afternoon sun. Strains of Emily Dickinson crept in:
"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
....Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
....When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--"
Shadows held their breath, and so did I. I drove on, only a few more miles to my destination. Now my Uncle Ray lives in a rather ramshackle farmhouse surrounded by miles of rich black earth whose harvest hasn't been his for years. Life's pace is slower out there but by no means lacking in complexity and challenge. Ray struggles to hold onto this house and pay the bills not covered by Medicare for my Aunt Liz, who suffers from Alzheimer's and stays in a nursing home in town. He misses her, but his dog Curly keeps him company. They're not quite interchangeable, Curly and Liz, but if you saw this man talk with this dog, you might think so.
My time in Iowa was a pilgrimage personal and political. The hills and valleys of memory became a landscape alive with complexity and challenge and compelling stories. The abundance of a few and the struggle of many is a relatively new phenomenon in that state, but no less so than in the rest of our country.
As I consider how struggle and abundance play out, another valley comes to mind. "Fear and Trembling in Silicon Valley" caps an article written by John Heilemann for the March issue of WIRED. The backdrop is the anti-trust case of the US Department of Justice against Microsoft. The outcomes of the trial still underway will ripple through our high-tech economy, if not our entire economy, for decades to come. Succeeding the judge's findings of fact against Microsoft, what is now at stake is the decision of remedy.
Heilemann turns up the volume on the screaming silence of the CEOs at the hub of America's high-tech industry in response to the efforts of the Department of Justice to line up testimony as the proceedings enter this next phase. This journalist reminds us that "we are smack in the middle of the 'largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,' and Silicon Valley is ground zero for this astonishing feat of accumulation. [The Valley is] replete with firms run by people of sharp intellect, fierce competitive drive, immense entrepreneurial ambition, and financial audacity--all but a tiny handful of whom are now cowering in the corner rather than speaking their minds about Microsoft." Among the rare few who have spoken out is the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems: 'How much money do you need to be able to tell the truth?'" In other words, so what if Bill Gates comes after you; do you really think you'll starve to death if you let loose with a little integrity?
The late Charles Schultz understood this dynamic perfectly. Linus sits there clutching his blanket with all possible sense of entitlement. Only the thumb in the mouth hints at insecurity. We won't mention the blanket itself. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Snoopy, ever covetous of this warm fuzzy object. Snoopy is surely plotting a coup. Linus threatens: "Make one move toward this blanket, you stupid beagle, and I'll destroy all hopes you have for the future!" Snoopy retreats. "I love a good warning," he muses to himself. We know this insight is temporary. Snoopy will be back.
"Take not for granted a privileged place," we sang in our first hymn of the morning. Enough time with the blanket, enough shares of the market, enough profits from enough land. What is our Enough?
Our larger community of faith is responding to the "How much is enough?" question through the most recent Study/Action Issue voted on at last June's General Assembly in Salt Lake City. Issues are submitted each year to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association by member congregations, including our own. One is selected for study and action by all the congregations over a two-year period, after which time a succeeding General Assembly may accord it the status of a Statement of Conscience, setting forth to the public our collective stance on said issue.
Receiving the majority vote at this last General Assembly was the issue, "Responsible Consumption as a Moral Imperative." Its context includes the reality that, as a nation representing a scant 5% of the world's population, we consume 40% of this earth's resources. Energy use, landfills, waste management, farming practices, food distribution, water management; each area of consumption suggests its own arena of accountability. Historically, we echo the words of William Henry Channing--not William Ellery, but his nephew, William Henry--who suggested that we learn "to live content with small means....To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich....To let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common."
Unitarian Univeralists can take the lead in promoting what has been termed by some, as voluntary simplicity, a concerted attempt to scale down on the material floss of life and live with fewer and leaner props on life's stage. Now the movement of voluntary simplicity has its attractions and its viable connection with the principles we espouse as Unitarian Universalists, but a recent adult ed session here at All Souls clarified that voluntary simplicity is a phenomenon among folks who are economically privileged and a viable movement, as such. For those among us who are rock bottom poor, who know only involuntary simplicity, the idea of voluntary simplicity must curdle an already raw disbelief that this is for real. The burden of credibility lies clearly with the "haves".
Martha Stewart, for example, waxed bittersweet in an interview:
"I have a beautiful weekend home in the Hamptons, but it is not, as it turns out, my summer dream house. It doesn't have the view of the ocean that I absolutely want. It doesn't have the rustic wood floors that I absolutely crave. It doesn't have a little dock to which I can tie my little rowboat." (from Jon Winokur, The Rich Are Different)
Poor Martha! I'll bet by now she's found some seaside cottage with all the right trappings to sate that modest appetite.
If the drive to acquire, if pure insatiability, were not so embedded in the psyche of our ethically tottering nation, we would not have occasion for our Journey Toward Wholeness Task Force, a presence at All Souls that engages in the work of anti-racism. Many here know that in late January forty of our members participated in an intensive weekend of anti-racist training. It was a long time in the planning, and the participation was full and vigorous.
Now I had a number of epiphanies during the course of this weekend. One was the discovery of some of the not so readily apparent layers of my fellow participants. We simply got to know each other a lot better than we could otherwise because we were engaged in a deeply personal and communal topic--racism and how to become anti-racist. Another was during our analysis of racism itself. It occurred to me that our societal tendency to measure our worth by what we acquire is right down there at the roots of racism. And race is an economic construct, an idea borne of the drive to amass human wealth on the human backs of others. Slavery, as it was practiced in the first few hundred years of this nation as we know it, is no longer legal, but its vestiges are real and subtle and still intertwined with the need of the few to amass wealth and power at the expense of the many. Chances are that with all the woes experienced by Martha, she did not hit the wall of redlining, for example.
I wonder. Trying so hard, sometimes so ruthlessly, to protect what we think we have or to acquire even more, how do we miss what is so elemental? The poet Wendell Berry recorded his own commentary:
"The first man who whistled thought he had a wren in his mouth.
He went around all day with his lips puckered, afraid to swallow."
Our notion of success, our sense of worth, is so bound up with the accumulation of wealth, of power, of money, of stuff. We speak of someone's net worth. What was the net worth of Mahatma Ghandi, or Mother Hale, or Gautama Buddha? What was the net worth of Martin Luther King Jr.? Unlike the hundred Christmases of Sally's father, King's wealth could not even be measured in a life rich with years. As he proclaimed only days before his murder in Memphis:
"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now....[God has] allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land." ( from his speech delivered March 28, 1968 in Memphis)
I ask: What does our promised land look like? And what is our vantage point? Where do we stand among the hills and valleys of our power and privilege? What is our Enough? What is our more or less?
Can we stand with Mary Oliver on the ocean's edge, with "coins of the sea in [our] pockets and plenty for the gulls, [assured that] "in this world [we are] as rich as [we] need to be?" Can we know, like our farmer friends, frustration and futility and still count our blessings? Can we grow through our years, like Sally's father, gracefully into the skin of our enough? Can we pray with Sally to not want more than we need and to be grateful for the beauty of creation around us? Can we
"....gather in reverence before all intangible things--
That eyes see not, nor ears can detect--
That hands can never touch,
that space cannot hold,
and time cannot measure."
Come walk with me out that back door into a star-glimmering assurance of spaceless space, timeless time. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 2000.