Yesterday I tried to leave Savers, arms filled with two grocery bags of clothing, and in making my exit participated in one of those awkward, familiar, and nearly wordless dances with two strangers who were also trying to leave. After some odd gesturing and false starts, I held the door with my back so that each man could pass through to the vestibule, and then we repeated the awkwardness in reverse order as we moved toward the outside door, which was held, Gumby-style, by the long arm of the man who had exited first.
This was a short interaction that felt somewhat long, and I was thinking about it-- considering individual expectations, social ordering, and shared ritual among strangers (preachers, as they say, are gonna preach)-- as the receipt that was tucked at the very top of my shopping bag caught the breeze, wrapped itself around my neck just long enough to give my cheek a kiss, and then departed on the wind.
Arms still full, I stopped walking and moved my eyes in the wind’s general direction. I didn’t see the receipt, but I did see one of the men from the doorway doing an odd two-step across the parking lot. This is another strangely familiar ritual of modern life: the way we move trying to catch paper as it blows away from us. Shuffle, freeze, spring, repeat if necessary. The man stalking my receipt was holding a metal towel bar; this was in fact part of what had made the door-exiting process so unwieldy. Now he jammed it to the ground and leaned over. Then he stood and raised an arm triumphantly. And then he crossed the parking lot and offered me the long white ribbon of a receipt, and with it a wide smile and something like an antidote to the fractious despair of public life in the last few weeks.
We hold shared doors, abide one another’s awkward dances, and catch each other’s flotsam and jetsam, sometimes using everything we have to do it.
In the small ways and without thinking about it, we do in fact know how to treat our neighbors as ourselves. Reflexive human kindness abides.
It helps me to notice this.
And maybe it’s enough, but the above story isn’t actually why I’m writing to you. It is just what I remembered in beginning to share another story, the one from today.
Reflexive kindness abides, and the thing is, we don’t have to wait for it to show up (though I do encourage us all to notice it in the small moments where it does). In very real ways we have the capacity to be that kindness, and to kindle it in the world moment to moment. We can live, in any second and in every doorway, as though the small things might be the big ones.
And one of the ways we might do this is through intentional, out-loud gratitude given for actions that have a positive impact.
This has become one of my spiritual practices over the past few years; “I see you and that mattered” is part of the legacy I hope to leave. And like most things we repeat intentionally and often, the gesture has over time become more automatic and habitual. I try, in ways small and larger, to let people know the good they have done.
And in this season, by which I mean right this minute and last week and probably the next one, too, I am focusing part of this effort on the leaders who are taking organizational, political, and sometimes personal risks to steward institutions toward centering something other than capitalism and convenience. I am very directly thanking the people having out-loud conversations, particularly where those above them have chosen not to, about how they are setting policies in this season to keep entire communities and vulnerable people within them safe amid Covid.
This one is personal. As a progressive faith leader myself, I honestly cannot fully convey the stress of making programming decisions for an organization and in partnership with a diverse team given the uncertainties and indeed the dangers of this year.
We really, really miss each other.
Things has gone on so much longer than we expected, and life has taken shapes we didn’t even imagine 18 months ago.
And we are all being gaslit- last week I received two emails within an hour of one another from two different organizations. One exulted: We’re reopening! The other apologized: We are going back online. We are all in the same state, they and I, but we are navigating (temporarily, in many cases) different realities based on our zip codes, or we are reading similar realities very differently based on our politics.
And also, it often feels like we are choosing among losing options, and we fear that the constituents to whom we are responsible, and in many cases, whom we love, might feel this too and respond accordingly. Many of those constituents are under incredible stress themselves, both from the overall situation to which we, too, are responding and also because they and their families are pressured and made desperate by all of the ways our systems put people under pressure and make them desperate.
On top of that, consumer behavior is what many adults have seen most consistently modeled, sometimes to the exclusion of more loving and life-giving theologies of collective behavior. This means that even well-meaning and generally caring people tend to approach institutions and their leaders as satisfaction vending machines: Give me want I want now. I put my coins in; deliver immediately, or face my outrage.
This is a lot to carry and to confront, and of course, the work doesn’t stop at simply holding the gaze and expectations of who count on us, and who depend on the organizations we lead. Leadership obligations in this season are active; this is a continually unfolding national crisis and it is being mediated through choices and relationships at the scale of human lives. People rightly expect us to make decisions and communicate about them, and it’s not an overstatement to say that lives depend on it.
So today, when a secular organization I’m a part of sent the email- the kind I have taken part in drafting, and recently, the kind you know is both the right answer and the wrong one- I read it twice. I thought about how scary it was to communicate the bad news that my own congregation’s leaders shared with our membership two weeks ago: we are online through October; here are our plans to stay connected. And then I wrote back to that institutional e-mail, the one that it seems like perhaps no one personally penned (but I know that they, someone, a human, very much did).
And what I wrote is “thank you.” Thank you for this fabulous programming line-up (and wow, it is); thank you for committing to make your programming more widely available online; thank you for having the courage to keep our communities safer in this moment of collective crisis.
As it turns out, those thanks landed—more than I could ever have imagined, in fact. I sent my cheerful “good job team” into the mailing list void . . . and I promptly received two e-mails in response to my short one, including one from the executive director himself. Both writers are so earnestly grateful for the good word that I find we are suddenly held together in our own human vulnerability . . . three strangers choreographing caring when we thought we were simply heading for an exit.
The shared heart, the hope, the need we have of one another’s reassurance; we kindle this in one another and I feel like I should say something in response.
And so I did. Quick, easy, connective.
“Thank you for letting me know that.”
We are, truly and inescapably, human together. In doorways. In emails. In pandemics. In this we find our threat of downfall, and counterintuitively, also our greatest chance of uplift.
May we lean toward that latter thing. (It’s ok to start small.)
<3
j
THAT's a sermon. Thank you for sharing this reflection and encouragement!