Journey

Hope and Mortality

- A.E. Howard Leave a comment
Lent, fasting, uncertainty, and hope
Lent, fasting, uncertainty, and hope

Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.

Ash Wednesday is always a sobering occasion, to walk around with a reminder of one’s mortality inscribed–albeit temporarily–on one’s forehead. Ashes suspended in oil cling to my skin and I resist the urge to wipe them away as though I could avoid thinking about reminders of death so easily.

There’s been much social media chatter and headlines this past week around the novel coronavirus that has jumped borders and leaves the entire globe poised for a potential outbreak. The anxiety I sense from some friends and acquaintances is very high, especially as I think many can agree, our government is unprepared in this political moment to organize a response if it becomes needed.

And here we are, as branches of the church that observe Lent, walking around with black smudges on our heads declaring the reality of death for ourselves and any who might see us today.

Where’s the hope in that?

An invitation to a Holy Lent is, as one of the priests at my church, Lissa Smith, preached this afternoon, “a recalibration that leads not only to a Holy Lent but a holy life.” Another pastor friend, Megan Westra, recounted in her Lenten newsletter a near brush with death a family member had recently experienced and what that does to be living in the daily reality of possible impending death.

And yet our lives still need to be lived. Death is the counterpoint, the inevitable period that all of us face and the reality is we have no idea when that period will come. For most of us it will be in old age, but that isn’t guaranteed to any of us. We brush it aside and we ignore it until we can’t.

Or until we go to church in the middle of a dreary gray Wednesday and receive the reminder of our deaths on our forehead so we can walk around like individual sign-acts for the rest of the day announcing that each day is a gift, for tomorrow is promised to none of us.

Gee, Anna, I thought you said you had some hope in the middle of all of this.

And yet I think there is hope in the middle of this. Hope isn’t needed where certainty exists. Where we are certain of things to come, we don’t hope, we know. Hope is needed when the future is uncertain. And hope is here in the imposition of the ashes where they are a sign of both our mortality and a remembrance that we have been given life eternal through Jesus. It is, as Lissa said, “…the reminder that God made me, and God will take me back. It is a reminder that we live, we will die, and we will be resurrected.”

She also pointed out a principle of mindfulness: “That which we practice grows stronger.”
So in the face of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, I think the call to all of us this Lent is to practice hope. And practice as that great spiritual advisor, Pabbi Troll, said in Frozen 2, when it looks like there is no future, all you can do is the next right thing.

Reading any of our history as humans reveals both the beauty that humans are capable of and the brutality. Life on this green and blue globe has never been peaceful nor has it been free of tragedy. All we can do is the next right thing and make our Lenten fast one that is the fast the Lord has chosen: “to loose the bonds of injustice… to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke… …to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin” (Is. 58:6-7).

There is freedom in embracing the inevitability of our own mortality and determining to do our best during the one thing we do have some say over–how we live.

Fog and Impeachment

- A.E. Howard Leave a comment

Fog and Impeachment

The day is dark from thick layers of clouds and fog, and as my eight year old runs around outside joyfully he proclaims, “see how beautiful it is today, mom, with all this fog.” The day is dark because the senate acquitted the president on what should have been two no-brainer charges, some of the easiest things that congress could have chosen to impeach him on. I’m glad they took the step to impeach, and yet I can’t help but feel some ambivalence about the fact that it wasn’t the human rights abuses at the border, the children in cages, the asylum seekers deported to face murder, rape, and torture instead of being allowed in for safety. And then, empowered by his impending acquittal at the hands of a party who’ve decided that closing ranks almost unanimously behind someone lacking in any morals, he gives the medal of freedom to one of the most racist and bigoted voices in our country.

And it’s hard for me to see the beauty in that sort of dark day, the fog surrounding my house in a layer of wintery mystery feels very different than the fog surrounding the outcome of his behavior in light of this inevitable acquittal.

I know many of you feel the same.

The thing about fog when you need to get somewhere is there’s nothing to do but take it slow and move forward. You can’t rush in with your high beams on because you’ll decrease the visibility and increase the danger to yourself and those with you. All you can do is make sure you’ve got everyone with you and proceed slowly with determination through the fog. Each step we take the fog clears around us and we can see a little more in front of us.

History is always easier to read sections of when the sections are complete. The war ended, the sickness ceased, people moved on and lived their lives and accomplished things.

It’s harder to live through a difficult section of history not knowing how long it lasts and how it’s going to turnout.

And since we can’t know that, I would argue that the outcome doesn’t matter to our individual actions right now. All we can do is the next right thing (yes, I’m totally quoting Frozen 2, I have little kids and it was a killer song).

I do know that being sucked into the constant news cycle whether online or on television is draining. So turn that off. Anything major, you’ll hear about soon enough anyway. Get up, move your body, and find the next right thing.

I heard the news the vote was in and immediately got up, made a pot of coffee, and danced to La Bamba. Partly because I badly needed to move my body, and partly because the song choice would be an unwelcome one if the powers that be could see me doing it. Then I came in here to write this because I wanted to help give voice to the heaviness, to the uncertainty, to the disappointment, inevitable though it may have been, and to offer my hands, to pull us all together, to walk through the fog.
Now figure out what the next right thing looks like, get together for a rally, go register some voters, reach out to some friends so they know they are not alone, gather your people, check on them. And just take the next step.

Intentions, Repentance, and Free Speech: Ruby Woo Day 1

- A.E. Howard Leave a comment

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Let me tell you, folks, getting here feels like a major accomplishment. I don’t know what it all was, but this week has been a major struggle. I had anxiety and panic-type flares for lack of a better term. And I’m super tired from getting everything ready to leave, and then plane, uber, hotel, straight into a meeting with no buffer because I was the last to arrive tonight, so I’m sort of wide open with the help of an IPA from the hotel bar. But now I’m tucked in and in yoga pants and I’m decompressing.

The trip leaders/facilitators lead us through a community-building exercise that started with a community safety agreement, which was fabulous. We were asked to imagine a person that we felt comfortable confessing to when we had messed up/sinned. And then in a word or phrase we shared aspects of what we thought of when we thought of that person. This sparked conversation about what we wanted to see in community throughout the trip and got us to go deeper faster I guess for lack of a better term in the sense that we have a lot of intense ground to cover in a short time and we needed a framework to help us get there.

We talked about intention vs. impact and which do we hold or can we hold them both or do we center impact. This is important in a multi-racial space because white folks often like to center intention when they do something that causes harm as though saying, “well, I didn’t mean too…” is some kind of get out of jail free card. This dovetails with a discussion I was having earlier this week regarding people treating repentance as a get out of jail free card, much like some do with the concept of free speech as though that means there should be no consequences for anything people say, when in reality free speech means you don’t get jailed for what you say, but it doesn’t mean you can’t get fired from your job or experience other personal consequences.

In Christian tradition, true repentance should be about facing and even welcoming the consequences of one’s actions as a path to make things right again. Repentance was never meant to be a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.

In the same way, some people–especially white folks in the context of talking about race–seem to think that as long as their intentions aren’t specifically harmful we should be granted a free pass on the harm that they caused. I’ve also personally experienced this with men thinking that if they didn’t intend harm, they should get a pass on the impact that they caused to women, and it doesn’t work like that either.

Intentions do matter. It’s ever so much worse if the intent is to actually cause harm and there’s not room for repentance or reconciliation in that case.

My main takeaway tonight was that if our intent is truly good, then we should welcome our neighbors telling us about the impact of our actions and be able to learn from that experience and change our actions, instead of centering our intentions in the conversation. By nature of someone telling you how they impacted them, they assumed good intentions, or they wouldn’t have bothered.