Beginner's Heart

I have grand-nieces. And a grand-nephew. They are, of course, amazing children. Funny, beautiful, smart and terribly entertaining (emphasis sometimes on the ‘terribly’ ). Last weekend they came for tea.

We sat down to the table, where plates of small peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate bread w/butter and slices of apples were ready. We had tea w/ milk and lumps of Demerara in our Peter Rabbit mugs (except for baby Noah, who uses the tiny cup). We stirred vigourously w/ our demitasse spoons (because they’re just the right size, and they have camels & elephants on the handles).

It was wonderful . And I kept thinking how much I loved my own great-aunts, the position I fill for Madison, Grace & Noah. Aunt Bonnie who taught me plants and cooking and left me so many of her cherished photos and heirlooms. Aunt Velma who taught me Yahtzee and how to make leftovers elegant and what a beautiful table looked like.

Aunt Ina, Uncle Earl & Mother

Aunt Ina who was always elegantly clad for work, and kept her house painfully clean. And then were the honorary aunts, like Tante Alma, with cookies in her house that fronted on the Presidential Square, where I came between laps of bicycling for hours.

These were my old ladies, as I called them. They cooked me my favourites — rhubarb cobbler and chicken & rice and cornbread and dark gingerbread — served them on china wreathed with flowers. Slipped me money when I started college. Bought me presents my first Christmas away from home. Wrote me letters when I was away, and generally loved me. Richly and with fierce female pride.

Now my 3 sisters and I are ‘the aunts,’ as my mother and her 3 sisters called my grandmother and her 4 sisters. As my father called his mother’s 4 sisters.

We are their elders. And I don’t think I’m ready…How will I know what stories are important? How will I do for Madison & Grace & Noah what Aunt Bonnie did for me? Is there a way to love so deeply that a child is somehow clad in love like armour, protected from the horrors that come into each of our fragile lives…? There must be, because Aunt Bonnie worked that miracle for me.

Somehow I have to learn this — find a way through the labryinth that is aging in this strange world we live in, and be there for these smaller ones. It may be time to put my inner elder to work…

Once, many years ago, I made it through the night breath by breath. I remember laying in the twin bed next to my mother and thinking: one more breath. just one more breath. And I thought: you can die of a broken heart. you can just choose to stop these so-called autonomic reflexes… and just die.

And it turns out I was right. You can die of a broken heart. Even just broken heart syndrome can leave you feeling like your heart has, in fact, shattered. Into pieces.

I remember thinking: you can just stop breathing. you can hurt so badly that you just stop breathing.

The human animal is a fragile ecosystem, it turns out. We can survive freezing temperatures, scale incredible heights, run for hours and birth quintuplets. But there are hurts so deep –  losses so grave — that the heart cracks into pieces. Like a knife improperly tempered, the heart fissures and breaks.

Somehow I find it comforting that there is a medical name for something that seems so primal. I find it even more comforting to know I made it through la noche oscura del alma, that dark night of the soul. The heart heals. Begins again. It gets better.

There’s a lovely excerpt from Desmond Tutu’s book on the ‘Net, titled ‘God is not a Christian.’ It gets to the heart of something I’ve believed since I was a child, but only had a name for in recent years. Belief is universal, and (as a dear friend says) all beliefs are ladders leading us upward. To one place.

When I was little, I knew that it was all the same thing, the many names and faces of divinity. I believed strongly in something that lived in everything. I don’t know what I called it, but everything had ‘spirit.’ Growing up in a Buddhist/ Taoist/ Catholic/ ecumenical Christian/ animist confluence of beliefs, it just made sense that each of these was just a different room in the house of the universe. A different ladder to climb back home.

It’s called ‘universalism,’ this belief that we all go home, irrespective of our beliefs. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims,  Jews, Wiccans or whatever, ‘when God has a party, everyone is invited.’ At least that’s how Quaker Phil Gulley puts it. He writes in an article in Friends Journal, the January 2011 issue, on what Universalism is. I think his points are critical to remember, as I wrestle w/ how to learn to love more inclusively, less judgmentally.

Michelangelo's Last Judgment -- detail

Gully notes that like a more famous minister — Carlton Pearson — he lost his position as a minister when he said he didn’t believe in hell. His first position, did I mention? Pearson — once a high-paid Tulsa minister w/ a large TV following — also lost his flock when he disavowed the idea of hell.

I don’t believe in a literal Hell either, for what it’s worth. I don’t have thousands of followers — or even a congregation of a few Quakers — but I never thought a merciful, divine whatever could sentence folks who follow their own belief systems, in good faith, to everlasting perdition. I don’t even want to believe in something that could find that okay. If I, a flawed human being, think that is overkill, how could something responsible for everything be so vindictive?

Gulley makes another important point that, in today’s era of religious ‘tolerance,’ can sound intolerant. He argues that ‘[t]he great mistake those of who sit at God’s left hand make is our insistence that all religions have equal value, that one is as good as the other, that it doesn’t matter what we believe.‘  This, he insists, is false. When entire segments of religion –  Christian as well as Muslim, although many of the Western faith don’t want to hear this — pray to heaven for a worldwide war that will exterminate much of the world, just so some of their own favoured religion can ‘go to heaven,’ Gulley (and I) believe that ‘something is drastically wrong.’

That’s what Desmond Tutu is saying in his article. What the Dalai Lama professes. That we’re all bearers of whatever it is that sparks divine reflection. And universalism proposes — like Rama says (the dear friend I mentioned earlier) — that different faiths are just multiple ladders. All leading home. What the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are doing is working hard outside the ‘box’ of traditional religion to teach us about going home, in a way. No one left out of the journey, or the party. Everyone included in a vast, worldwide spiritual hug. Even me & Phillip Gulley…:) We all get to go home.

This poem sums up — far more beautifully than I can say — how I feel about the current economic situation. It’s by Humberto Ak’Abal, The Dance. While companies and the rich (and even many of the never-will-be rich) are complaining about taxes and ‘handouts’ for the poor, in Oklahoma almost one million children (918,849) were rated ‘poor’ in 2009 — below the poverty level. One in 5 — TWENTY PERCENT — are at risk of hunger. Daily. Dancing on the edge of a penny, indeed….