Author: gracesmuggler

A few evenings ago, I had the pleasure to stand right alongside the ocean. I loved listening to the sounds of the waves breaking and the seagulls cawing.

I stood at the edge for a long time, letting my thoughts come and go like waves themselves, then at times, letting them subside entirely. At this moment, I was more interested in listening than thinking.

I found myself seeking wisdom for myself and my wider community. 

I realized it’s a real privilege to be there and added my awareness to that. Then I decided to stand there and really take it in, wondering if I might find insights of some kind.

I let my feet sink deeply into the earth. Though the sands shifted and changed quite readily, it was a firm kind of stance. I thought about fearfulness – the many fears I tend to carry and the fears we are carrying collectively. These are understandable fears. 

But I took that stance because I was seeking something else. From time to time in my life, I’ve had moments when I felt remarkably empowered and enabled to hold strong, speak prescient truth, or embody steadfastness even in the face of fear and inevitable loss.

“I want more of that,” I thought. “For me. For us.”

I want wisdom and insight toward less fear. I want an alive form of fierceness that loves passionately and transforms the particular narratives and the particular violence that we are living.

Not much later, a shell washed right up to my feet. It was lined with a lovely shade of purple.

I smiled.

Ah, yes, purple. The color often associated with wisdom and spiritual insight. The color often associated with sacred noticing.

Then a few minutes later, it happened again. A second purple shell washed up next to me.

Yes. I loved it. So then I started looking. 

Empowered by the symbols of wisdom at my feet, I started moving my feet down the shoreline, looking for more. In twenty minutes, I found the first handful.

Then after dropping those off in my room, I quickly found a second handful.

An abundance of purple shells.

An abundance of symbolic wisdom toward less fear.

This search for recognition on a beach certainly didn’t transform all of our challenging narratives or all our challenging violence. But for a moment, it changed my relationship to them. And it made me wonder how to keep searching.

I want more of this. For me. For us.

– Renee Roederer

I’m going to try something.

This week, for myself and my wider community, I’m going to prioritize a different way of processing. I’m going to privilege intuition.

Many of us are easily inundated with thoughts – verbal internalizations which help us process what’s around us, often with a particular kind of logic. Verbal thoughts are not to be disparaged. They are one vital way to process information, create meaning, and make decisions.

But if this is the only way we process the world, we can miss other ways of finding knowledge and insight. Particular thoughts can overtake us and move toward the rumination of anxiety. These thoughts can also take our focus away from our present moments, our surroundings, our relationships, and our bodies.

But have you ever slowed down thoughts and opened space for an aha moment? Can you recall one of these moments for you and your community? Perhaps we can open ourselves to more of these.

Last week, I watched InnSaei – The Power of Intuition, a documentary on Netflix. Scientists and researchers talk about the human brain and various types of processing. Much of our brain’s processing happens outside of our consciousness. But if we can slow our thinking, paying attention to what’s happening in our bodies and our surroundings, insights emerge apart from conscious, verbal, logical thought.

For instance, think about people who have solved scientific, mathematical, or social problems through their dreams. Intuition works like that but in our waking life too.

So here’s what I’m going to do. This week, I happen to be in a place where I can be outside in nature quite a bit. When I’m not purposefully using words in conversations, reading, or writing, I’m going to try to breathe, slow down my thoughts, and just pay attention.

If I start ruminating on something, no judgment. I’ll just bring myself back to pure noticing.

I’m curious if I might gain some intuitive insights I have yet to imagine.

Want to try it with me?

– Renee Roederer

Money, when used well collectively (admittedly, it isn’t always) serves as a currency. Like a  current, it flows through communities and creates an economy of care through patterns of giving and receiving.

But money isn’t our only currency.

Years ago, I went to a workshop led by Eric Law. He is an Episcopalian priest, author, and church consultant. The workshop I attended was based on his book, Holy Currencies: Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries. That workshop was designed for church contexts, but additionally, I find his way of thinking to be applicable to any organization or community that seeks sustainability in life-giving ways.

Eric Law invites us to think about a variety of currencies as they flow through communities and create patterns of care through sustained giving and receiving. In addition to money, he names these to be especially important for sustainable organizations, communities, and intentional efforts for change:

1) Time and Place

2) Gracious Leadership

3) Relationship

4) Truth

5) Wellness 

These are vital currencies too.

After all, an organization can have all kinds of money, but if it has created a culture where it’s fundamentally unsafe to tell the truth, it’s not life-giving, viable, or sustainable.

Likewise, if a community pursues financial resources to the detriment of wellness, it causes harm rather than vitality.

If a community uses resources like money and power to stratify relationships rather than empowering those relationships toward equity, it creates injustice and oppression.

It’s pretty clear that we need to prioritize much more than money if we want to grow healthy communities and organized efforts for sustained change.

What other currencies would you add?

–Renee Roederer

Jesus of Nazareth talked a lot about money and material possessions. Like, a lot. Almost more than anything else. The most frequent topic in his teachings is the Kin(g)dom of God. Right after that, it’s money.

He taught about money all the time.

And contrary to what today’s prosperity gospel leaders might teach, Jesus did not discuss how to get wealth and hoard it. He did not tell people that their personal worth was dependent upon particular possessions. He did not advocate that people give money in order to get much more in return.

And he did not uphold or promote an economy of extraction. In his day, the Roman Empire occupied his land, taxed the people exorbitantly, and marginalized the poor. Wealth moved from the masses to the few.

No, in his very first sermon, Jesus of Nazareth spoke about his calling through these words of Isaiah:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

Then he included marginalized and oppressed people in everything he did. He empowered their leadership. Alongside them, he walked on foot around Galilee and Judea and taught quite a bit about greed and wealth.

It seems that part of our collective liberation involves freedom from greed and the trappings of wealth. Perhaps we need to talk more about this too. . .

–Renee Roederer

[Photo: NASA]

When Donald Trump withdraws this nation from the Paris Accord, as news sites are reporting this morning that he is about to do, I really believe that other nations should consider placing sanctions on the United States. I don’t like saying that, but perhaps that becomes necessary.

If people are enabled to wreck our climate, they are catalyzing tremendous harm to generations behind us. And it’s not as though these effects cannot be seen now. Island nation states are literally trying to figure out where they will evacuate their citizens in the next ten years.

It troubles me that one person is enabled to make this decision on our behalf, creating harm for years to come.

And it troubles me that the greed of the fossil fuel industry lies behind it.

We could invest in renewable energy, add ingenuity and new possibilities to our nation, and create a host of new jobs in the process.

But our nation, including its politicians, serve fossil fuel moguls and their money.

– Renee Roederer

Wealth is not synonymous with worth.

Likewise,

Productivity is not synonymous with worth.

Productivity has never been the full measure of our lives, nor what it means to be human. But I think it’s quite possible to internalize the opposite. At times, I confess that this false belief emerges in my deeply internalized thinking and feeling.

Our culture conveys that productivity is the highest good, yet if we chase after it — I don’t merely mean working well in a meaningful way, but if we chase after it– we are rarely satisfied.

When it becomes the totality of our time or our self-understanding, we soon find that it is chasing us. In this mindset, no matter how much time we put into our labor, it is never enough. And we are never enough. In this thinking and feeling, it’s possible to have internalized individuals or groups swimming around in our minds, either from the present or from the past, who judge us consistently as falling short. This may even happen just slightly outside our consciousness.

It’s easy to internalize these people and these beliefs. Yet truly, productivity is not synonymous with worth.

We do not need to reach a certain benchmark to be worthy of love, care, and belonging. We do not need an enormous salary to convey that we matter.

Yet as human beings, we need wholeness and fullness. Sometimes, this means that we need different experiences — rest, renewal, rejuvenation. Sometimes, this means that we need different parts of our brain to be active — the creative, the playful, the intuitive. These add to our own lives, and they also add to our communities.

I’m going to repeat this today and let myself believe it because it is really true:

Productivity is neither worth nor fullness.

–Renee Roederer

Okay, I’ll admit that my title is a bit sarcastic and snarky. But this is honestly a question I’ve been reflecting on recently. . .

Why do we teach our children to share if we, as adults, fundamentally believe that it’s wrong — some even believe it’s immoral — to share with other adults?

Or in practice,

Why do we teach our children to share if we ourselves hardly ever share with others?

Let me up the ante here: I’m talking about wealth.

A dangerous, every-person-for-himself ideology seems to growing. It’s certainly not new, but it’s gaining even greater influence. This ideology thrives on greed and justifies itself through a mix of pride, individualism, Ayn Rand objectivism, and prosperity theology purporting to be Christian. Then it claims to be morally superior.

After all, no matter how vulnerable a person may be (ahem, including from structures built on this ideology) it would be immoral to help or share from our wealth because that would decrease self-reliance, and we choose not to share, you know, for the good of the other person.

Um… okay. Your greed is showing.

Want to know how far some will take this ideology? Some have argued that schools should stop providing free lunches to impoverished students in order to teach self-reliance and grit. Why not just take it to the next step then and stop providing food to all children entirely?

Oh, that’s right. You only meant those children.

Sure, there is certainly such a thing as toxic charity, and we should avoid that. But make no mistake: We can share from our wealth. If we did this, we could create an economy and society of care and wellbeing that upholds all and leaves no one behind. We could eliminate poverty. We could make sure that children and vulnerable adults do not die of preventable diseases.

Think this is a pipe dream? It’s not.

But it requires sharing our wealth willfully and with purpose. I’m not only talking about the 1% (though I certainly am). I’m talking about people like me. I’m talking about people who read this blog. I’m choosing to challenge myself with this. I’m choosing to challenge you with this.

Why do we accept a dog-eat-dog society as normative and good? Everyone benefits when all people have what they need. Are there areas of our lives where we have much more than we need? Let’s find the most effective ways to share that wealth.

–Renee Roederer

Boy, it all kind of caught up with me last night. 

Just a lot of sadness about things that are happening in our nation and world. . . things that are happening in my local area. . . Really cruel and destructive ICE raids happened here two days ago. . . Here they are described in the national news. 

Sometimes, you just have to feel it. I certainly know I’m not the only one who feels this way. 

Most importantly, my compassion goes to people who are directly affected. People are bearing the full weight of these forms of trauma. Our whole communities need to rally around these individuals and families in support. 

Mr. Rogers has a song called, “What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

Last night, someone suggested that I watch Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I did, and it was lovely to sit with some kindness. No regrets.

It makes me want to ask others –  In the midst of all that is happening, what do you do with the sad that you feel? How are you feeling it and processing it? What’s helpful for you?

– Renee Roederer

[NASA, Public Domain]

I found myself reflecting on this last night. . .

Every human being is like a universe. Metaphorically speaking, a host of galaxies.

Did you know that there are more atoms in just one strand of DNA than there are stars in most galaxies? That is beautiful and actually true!

Here’s the quote about this from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

“There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe.” – The Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 2

Every human being, every animal, and every plant is gloriously intricate. Life is amazing in all its complexity and particularity.

This quote about atoms and DNA blows my mind, and it also expands how I think about my fellow human beings.

A little universe. . .

. . . the server from the restaurant where I ate lunch.

. . . the person who brings our mail.

. . . the person I passed on the street and will never see again.

. . . the internet troll.

. . . the person who is facing deportation.

I wish we truly saw each other in all our complexity and particularity. I want to open myself to this.

It doesn’t mean that we would instantly and magically all get along. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t decry horrific behavior. But it would certainly make it harder to dehumanize one another. And gracious, we need that.

I want to work more on this.

Humanity – a multiverse of beings in all their complexity and particularity.

– Renee Roederer