A person looks at the nigh sky, filled with stars.
Sometimes, I marvel at who is in my life. Sometimes, I am stunned to ponder that I could begin alone then become connected to who after who after who after who.
And this never ends.
It’s like a Big Bang, really. A Whole Universe of Belonging.
We each start as a singularity. Then each one of us bursts forth, brought into an abundance of connections, born anew bit by bit through the particularities of relationship.
And these particularities create build form nurture cultivate and renew.
They expand.
This is an ever expanding Universe — this Cosmos of who after who after who after who.
Two wooden tables and four chairs are turned over. One has a sticker of an American flag on the bottom.
A blessed Table Flipping Monday, y’all.
A few years ago, my friend Sarah made a suggestion that the Monday of Holy Week ought to be considered Table Flipping Monday. Of course, that’s a pretty humorous title, but Sarah also helped me think about this . . .
During the last week of his life, when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the very first thing he did was walk into the center of communal, religious life and hold it accountable. He went into the Temple, the most holy place, and was horrified to discover that some were making unjust money as they oppressed the Jewish people in their religious devotion. He turned over the tables and chased out the money changers, quoting Jewish scripture, saying, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made a den of robbers.’”
I want to be careful about how I talk about this story, in large part because throughout history, Holy Week has been an occasion when Christians have oppressed Jews and even caused violence. When I think about this day, I don’t aim to criticize the Temple or the religious heritage of which Jesus was fully a part.
Instead, I want to consider the ways in which my own religious tradition ought to be held accountable. That includes this painful history we have caused our Jewish siblings. And it includes a host of other abuses fully expressed in the present.
Religion can give life and meaning, and it can be twisted as a tool for oppression.
There are a multitude of ways in which tables ought to be flipped over. In fact, accountability and truth telling can be acts of spiritual devotion in and of themselves.
Jesus rages against the oppression and manipulation of others. Today, we need prophets and holy agitators to follow into this calling. I offer my gratitude today for people who hold my tradition and our actions to account.
One of Christianity’s foundational teachings involves a holy leveling – an inverted shift where the marginalized become the most empowered and the most powerful are brought into humility.
But way too often, we fall far short of this vision. Today can serve as a day of confession.
I’d like to share this poem by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It can be found in his book, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.
Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom… and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit. I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my Beloved…I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrolled story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope I can forget my story during the day, and hope I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet. Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast.
I fell asleep to a podcast last night, and then, they played all night. When I woke up, I heard this conversation between Krista Tippett and Janine Benyus on an episode of On Being — “Biomimicry: An Operating Manual for Earthlings.”
These were the first words I heard today, and I’d like to share them:
Krista Tippett: I’ve been thinking in these last years about how culturally, I think we essentially ask capitalist questions as our starting point just instinctively: “How soon?” “How much?” And I’ve been paying attention to the questions in the chapter you’ve mentioned and other questions you’ve thrown out there, like “What’s worth doing?” “How shall we live here?”… the questions, “What would nature do here?” “What wouldn’t nature do here?”
Janine Benyus: Yeah, there’s this set of questions that we ask because biomimicry looks at nature as “model for emulating” — measuring to judge the rightness of our actions… The questions that go with that are, “What would nature do here?” and “here” is the most important part of that, because that’s the context. “What would nature do here?” “What wouldn’t nature do here?” is that measure part. And then, “why?” and “why not?”
That’s the mentor part. That’s the part where, if you have a mentor at work, and you’ve been there a while, something weird happens. You don’t know what it is. You go in, close the door, and say to the mentor, “Why did that just happen?”
“Oh, let me tell you about that.”
So life knows how to live here. Over 3.8 billion years, you know? It does. We have spent 250 years of Western science, asking about nature, and now, we’re starting to ask to learn from nature. It’s exciting! It’s a completely different way to do science to learn from rather than to just learn about, right?
That’s the switch. That’s really the profound switch. It calls on us to sit down, get out our notebooks, and pay attention in a whole different way than when we were just measuring. You know, natural history — my field — started out with, you went out in the jungle, and you didn’t ask. You shot it and brought it back. Our natural history museums are filled with drawers, and that’s when we were asking the “What” question. “What are you?” Not, “How do you live here?”
My local choir is performing Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony later this month, and I’m really looking forward to this concert. This Symphony is often called “The Resurrection Symphony.” The music and the text of the choral movement are so powerful.
Our choir director typically writes in translations for us over the text we’re singing, so we can know its meaning. I love how he translates it in the word order of the sung language rather than phrasing it for English. Because of this, sometimes, the literal phrases grab my attention.
As I was singing in our rehearsal, I had one of those moments with this phrase:
To bloom again were you sown To bloom again were you sown
Perhaps that’s a phrase we might need to hear. And so I’ll cast it out today, letting it mean whatever it needs to mean for each of you.
To bloom again were you sown To bloom again were you sown
A recording will definitely do, but if you can listen to the real birds outside chirping away, even better. Bird songs calm our nervous systems.
Fun Facts: The sounds of birds are lovely, and they remind us of spring (great things). But they’re also calming for evolutionary reasons too. When our early human ancestors heard birds chirping and singing in the trees, that meant there probably weren’t any predators around. So everyone could be more calm and less on guard.
And our bodies remember this. So listen away!
Bird songs, along with other forms of calm, activate our parasympathetic nervous systems. And in times of stress or collective trauma, this is what we need. Our autonomic nervous systems have a 1) sympathetic nervous system which ramps up our ‘fight or flight’ responses, and a 2) parasympathetic nervous system which calms them down.
So in times of stress and trauma, we want all the life hacks we can muster to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
A red cartoon heart with white arms gives a self-hug.
A Stress Relief Hack:
Give yourself a hug.
Sure, you may feel silly, but try to put that away for a few reasons: 1) It’s good to give yourself self-compassion, 2) no one is watching, and most importantly, 3) this has great health benefits because it releases stress.
When we hug, our brains reduce chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine (big, feel good chemicals) and you know what? While it’s certainly great to hug another person, our brains don’t fully know the difference between an other-people hug and a self-hug, especially if we place good intentions of self care into that hug.
Hugs also stimulate the vagus nerve.When we activate the parasympathetic nervous system, that calms our fight or flight responses. The vagus nerve is a special hack to know about, because it plays a big role in that system. When we hug, we stimulate pressure points in our skin called pacinian corpuscles, and these receptors fire signals to the vagus nerve. Among other things, the vagus nerve plays a role in regulating blood pressure. Hugs, including self-hugs, activate this system and frequently, lower blood pressure.
Smuggling Grace 