White Identity, Anti-Racism & Spiritual Development

I have long identified as a white anti-racist person.

Not because I think labels are particularly meaningful for me, but because I know words are powerful and political- whether you intend it or not.

From my earliest memories as a little girl living in the nearly all-white suburbs of New England, my mother made damn sure I was aware of white privilege, present day racism including the defacto segregation of the northeast, and the sinful (though my mother never would have used that word) institutionally racist American history that remained unacknowledged, unresolved and unreconciled.

As a young adult, this early education in racial consciousness led me to:

• be curious about and participate in organizations like Facing History, Facing Ourselves and The National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ),
• to continue to educate myself about our racist history in the United States and in the world, and the ways in which others have confronted racism non-violently,

and it prompted me to

• sit with other white anti-racist individuals, in a safe and non-shaming environment, to reflect inward on the biases and stereotypes that I have carried on in myself.

Now, I am grateful for this education and the moral values my mother parented into me, as I have found all of these endeavors to be valuable to me.

It has allowed me to have an understanding of my own white identity and what role racism played in its creation.

For example, the way racism bleached the ethnicity of my white ancestors, so that when my great-grandparents and grandparents immigrated to the United States, they were no longer Norwegian,  English, and Russian (each with its own unique languages/accents, cultures and last names!), they became "purely" white.

This process of institutionalized racism not only left a cultural vacuum for most white European Americans, but for many, including my family, it left a spiritual vacuum as well.

I see this not only in my own white identity formation, but in others as well; which for some, could lead to a spiritual crisis.

Over the years, I've begun to conceptualize 5 spiritual deficits that seem linked with the impact of institutionalized (and internalized) racism on white identity.

These 5 spiritual deficits for white people can include great struggle with chronic feelings of:

1.) Scarcity instead of Abundance,

2.) Fear instead of Safety,

3.) Shame instead of  Self-compassion,

4.) Resentment instead of  Forgiveness,
and an over-all schema or worldview as

5.) I instead of We, or Separation instead of Interconnection.

What's more, rather than recognize Scarcity, Fear, Shame, Resentment, "I," and Separation as spiritual deficits, they can be misperceived as false refuges- floating rafts to cling to in times of change and confusion.

I was reminded of these 5 spiritual deficits recently while re-listening to an On-Being radio podcast of a show titled "Where Does it Hurt," which included a Krista Tippet interview with African American Civil Rights leader and activist Ruby Sales.

In the interview, Ms. Sales said the following:

There’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning, and I don’t hear — we talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that speaks to Appalachia. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them rather than call upon the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.

In contemplation of these 5 spiritual deficits, in the last couple of years, I have had increasing interest in looking at the over-lap between my social and moral values which includes living from a place of anti-racism, and my spiritual life and spiritual development.

I realize for many people, this evolution of bringing social and moral values to the realm of spiritual life and development may seem completely obvious- it probably is.

But for someone like me, who grew up in a completely secular world that was sterile of anything related to religion, god and spirituality (or ethnic culture), this was actually pretty radical for me.

After the White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month that led to a death of a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, I came upon an interesting online article called: "For White Christians Non-Racism is Not Enough," in America Magazine: The National Catholic Review.

Though not a Christian myself, I've always been intrigued with the work of those Christians who demonstrate their profound and admirable commitment to equality and justice through their day-to-day lives.

In the article, the author Meghan Clark (a white female professor of Moral Theology at St John's University) said the following:

We live in a culture that idolizes personal choice. This has obstructed our ability to recognize, confront and dismantle racism. Our narrow focus on the individual has deluded us into thinking that as long as we do not personally malign, attack or discriminate against persons of color, we can claim to be non-racist. Non-racism is a supposed third option, beyond racism and anti-racism, where politeness and civility are paramount. It recognizes the evil of white supremacy but, like Pontius Pilate, washes its hands of responsibility. As such, it is a rejection of racism that is also a passive acceptance of white supremacy. It allows white Christians to acknowledge racism is a sin while continuing to reap the benefits of white supremacy.

It seems necessary, now more than ever, to challenge ourselves to dig deeper than the visible thoughts and behaviors of racism and anti-racism in order to touch into what may lie underneath.

For many white people, I believe this may include the 5 spiritual deficits I mentioned above.  Because, just imagine what variety of thoughts and behaviors would be born of a white person who lived from a place of Abundance, Safety, Self-Compassion, Forgiveness, "We," and Interconnection?

May it be so.

A Time for Ferocious Prayer

While driving my 8 year-old son to his YMCA camp on Monday morning, after he had finished singing along to a Bruno Mars song on the radio, we both listened to this news report:

One woman died and 19 others were injured on Saturday when a car drove into a crowd of counter-protestors at a White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Upon hearing the news report (which I had not anticipated on the pop music station we were listening to), I looked back in the rearview mirror at my son.

His eyes were wide.  His face was solemn.  He sat quietly.

I asked  him, "Did you hear that news report?"

"Was I not supposed to?" he asked me right back.

Oh man, I thought to myself.  Where do I go from here when I have 5 minutes until he gets out of the car for a full day of camp at the Y?

"Do you want me to tell you what happened?" I asked him in my most calm and collected mom-voice.

"Yes," he firmly answered.

Since that conversation I have found myself in more prayer than meditation in my time for spiritual practice.

I find myself wanting to get all the way down to the floor, kneeling, with my forehead resting on cushioned rug.

I want to hold my prayer beads, sing my hymns, and read my books that offer a wholesome and aspirational view of god and the cosmos.

There is of course no clear algorithm for when I switch from meditation over to prayer, or do some combination of the two; it comes from the pressing need of the moment. It comes from my gut.

Then, last night while watching the President of the United States of America defend the actions and rights of the Ku Klux Klan at a press conference at Trump Towers, all I could say is, "Oh my god..."

How on earth do we explain this to our children? How on earth do we protect our children and help them feel safe- physically, emotionally and spiritually? 

And not just our own children.  Our neighbor's children. Our enemy's children.

I have no answers.  Probably that is why I am doing so much praying.

All I can think to do is repeat over and over the words of Mahatma Gandhi that I've quoted in this blog before:

Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.

I have also taken heart in the reminder of South African leader Nelson Mandel's words from his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom through "the most popular Tweet of all time" by our 44th U.S. President Barack Obama:

I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes I have already cited, but because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country. I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps for just a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.

And in between these words of hope and wisdom, I will continue to pray- ferociously.

In addition, below, I've offered a child's prayer, in the form of an excerpt from a favorite children's book called Old Turtle by Douglas Wood because that's all I've got today.

May it be so.

Grappling With Impermanence in Day to Day Life

When I was seven years-old my mother died for less than a minute.

She was scuba diving at the time, a final test for certification in fact, and while in a deep Atlantic Ocean dive her oxygen tank stopped functioning properly.

I have a clear-as-day memory of my father running up the beach to tell the family friend who was watching my sister and I splash around in the water that my mother was being rushed to the emergency room of the local hospital, and as a child, it was my first real brush with death.

Since that time I've had quite a few more encounters with the radical truth of impermanence of all varieties, including death.

Most recently, it took the form of a walk last Sunday with my father-in-law who has early-onset Alzheimer's.

I'm actually fortunate to be able to say that I'd not yet had anyone close in my life with this terrible brain disease, but now, with my father-in-law, I see it very up close and personal.

And where he is now, I will say anecdotally as I still understand very little about the progression of the disease itself, is a stage where he is completely unable to hold any short-term memories.

It's like the light switch for short-term memory was just turned off.

So the good news is, my father-in-law is still able to recognize all of his family members, knows who he is, and is retaining most of his own personal history that has been long logged away in the neurological caverns of long-term memory.

It's strange though, to do something like a walk in nature with him, and all the while holding in my awareness that this event (at least on a conscious level) will be gone for him the near moment it is over.

I'm a big fan of writer and creator of the website Brain Pickings, Maria Popova, and she wrote this statement just last week:

Joy and sorrow are equally transient. Even transcendence is transient.

I thought of those words after spending the stolen time with my father-in-law.

Another piece too, which added to this theme of impermanence, was that my 3 year-old daughter was also walking with us that day, and she is now herself waking up to the reality of impermanence in life.

It seems almost everyday now, my daughter is inquiring about death, illness and the afterlife.

And I must admit, it can be painful at times to watch the (what feels like) bitter reality of that impermanence settle in to her 3 year-old understanding of the world.

It almost makes me sympathetic to the mythic story of the royal parents of the historical Buddha who tried to keep this truth of impermanence away from their son by forbidding him to go beyond the palace gates where he would inevitably encounter aging, illness and death.

For my daughter though, it is not only people for which she is contemplating mortality.

She will look at a pink rose her father planted for her in our garden, and ask me:

"Will this rose die too mommy?" 

"Yes," I tell her, "the rose too."

Ugh.

The other day at the playground she was petting someone's dog, and while continuing to stroke the dog's soft fur, my daughter decided to tell the dog owner the story of her own dog who had died just last year.

She tells a lot of people that story these days.

I don't think I'm alone though, in my feeling of being a little bit like the blind leading the blind as my daughter begins to grapple with the certainty of impermanence in everyday life.

This sense of being somewhat ill-equipped for the task, leads me to seek out the hard-won efforts and wisdom of the palliative care movement, which has taught Western society a lot more about how to die well, how to be with the dying in a wholesome capacity, what it means to "live well" with pain and disease, and how to talk about death as a facet of impermanence that is natural and maybe even(though this is completely counterintuitive for me) nourishing.

Dr. BJ Miller, a palliative care physician, University Professor and former Executive Director of the Zen Hospice Project in California, has said in an On Being interview called "Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don't Control:"

We have  these bookends of birth and death and in between feels like a guitar solo- in between, all sorts of crazy things can happen. But the song begins and the song ends, at least for this bodily life. And the fact that we share, that 100 percent of us across time and space, across cultures, that all of us share that version of fate is compelling to me.

This reality is "compelling" to me as well, which makes it all the more curious that this reality, this truth, has not led modern-day humankind (at least in the western world) to get better at the process of illness, death and dying.

In my professional life, I have been fortunate enough to know a young man who, like Dr. Miller, has a deep commitment to palliative care, but his work is with animals.

I've known this fellow for many years now, and his decision to volunteer with an animal shelter with the specific purpose of offering love and kindness--in the form of long hours of petting, taking a last long run, or offering a large piece of red meat as a last meal--to animals who are soon to die continues to move me.  His level of compassion for animals who are at the end of life (dogs for the most part) is profoundly touching.

For me, I think one way I try to "get better" at willingly encountering impermanence in all its various forms it to actually recognize all its various forms- and they are not all full of sadness and sorrow either.

Take for example my 18 year-old niece.  She just graduated from high school in June of this year, and is now traveling out of the country for the first time on her own to study for a year in Europe.

Now, if I was her own mother, I'm sure this life stage would be an absolute mish-mosh of grief-panic-stricken-wonderment. 

But as her aunt, just slightly removed from the epicenter of parental insanity which I certainly feel in relation to my own two children, I can see (perhaps more clearly) the absolute beauty of this passage through impermanence with its own organic "bookends" and "guitar solo."

In celebration of my niece's "guitar solo," I sent her a copy of this poem by 19th century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

A Psalm of Life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

   Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

   And things are not what they seem.

 
Life is real! Life is earnest!

   And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

   Was not spoken of the soul.

 
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

 
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

   And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

   Funeral marches to the grave.

 
In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

   Be a hero in the strife!

 
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

   Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,— act in the living Present!

   Heart within, and God o’er head!

 
Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

 
Footprints, that perhaps another,

   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

   Seeing, shall take heart again.

 
Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

In my own spiritual life, I've written before, that I feel impermanence at times as a snake skin that I shed each time I wake up a little more to reality and my True Self.

[Though, I should also probably add, in some of those moments I have also had plenty of those experiences of grief and panic alongside the wonderment- more of that topic for another time...]

Dr. Miller also refers to this type of more unconventional death without dying in his 2015 Ted Talk "What Matters at the End of Life" when he said:

Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well -- not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination.

I saw this morning on the news that today is the 72nd anniversary of the United States nuclear bombing of the Japanese city Nagasaki that killed approximately 70,000 people- 3 days after the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people.

In light of this, as I consider all the ways human beings engage in this process of grappling with impermanence in day-to-day life, it occurs to me that, with the pleasant and the unpleasant experiences in life that will inevitably arise, present themselves and eventually fall away, comes a necessary respect for the delicate, maybe even fragile, balance that requires the utmost presence and loving awareness that we can muster.

Otherwise, we can automatically slip back into those human mine fields like greed, hatred and delusion which act as obstacles toward a mindful relationship with impermanence.

I pray today for some of that "imagination" in our world  leaders.

May it be so.

Forgiving Our Ancestors Part I: Causes & Conditions

(Early photograph of the New England town I grew up in.)

Of all the endeavors in a spiritual life, there are 3 tasks that remain most elusive to me:

1.) Trust,
2.) Faith, &
3.) Forgiveness.

The third, forgiveness, has been most on my mind and heart over the course of this summer in a more prominent way ever since I traveled to the mountains of rural America to spend some time with my family of origin- the family I was born into.

Before heading out there, I was reminded of the words of Jack Kornfield, the prominent western Buddhist teacher and author, who once said in a Dharmaseed Podcast I was listening to:

When Buddha and Jesus went home, they had trouble with their family too.

I have to tell you, I laughed right out loud when I heard that because a.) it was so funny, and b.) it was so validating.

Like most people I suspect, forgiveness as a spiritual practice becomes Advanced Placement Practice when it comes to family.

Not that I just began to introduce forgiveness into my spiritual practices just this year- no this has been an effort of many, many years.

It's interesting though, because this year something has felt different, like a fault line, deep underground, has finally begun to shift.

I find forgiveness is a lot like grief, in that, for the most part, it seems to unfold and unlock in quite small, but no-less meaningful moments.  Moments so subtle and unsuspecting that they usually take my breath away.

Take last week for example.

I was re-watching  a film I have seen many times, Steven Spielberg's 1997 movie Amistad, and a scene at the end of the picture all of the sudden cracked open the previously impenetrable protective wall I've built up inside of me that, while well-intended, makes forgiveness feel all but impossible.

It was the scene where U.S. President John Quincy Adams, played by the great actor Anthony Hopkins, presents the case as lead attorney of the United States vs. the Amistad Africans to the Supreme Court in 1841.

It is a beautiful scene worth watching or re-watching if you haven't in a while.

But what got me this time, was the very last part of President Adams speech which he slowly, thoughtfully, dictates next to a statue of his own father, President John Adams.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams: We've long resisted asking you for guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality which we so, so revere is not entirely our own. Perhaps we've feared an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But, we've come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we've been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.

Perhaps it may sound strange to you that these words could have been a catalyst for forgiveness for me.  Or perhaps not.

But it may become more clear if I tell you that Radical Acceptance has been the single most helpful concept for me to engage in forgiveness as a spiritual practice because it holds the truth that everything, everything, has causes and conditions- even if I never know what they are.

When I allow myself to really spend time with the facts of the lives of those I am struggling to forgive, then  understanding (a stepping stone of forgiveness) soon follows, and I find myself saying:

"Of course so-and-so did or said x,y,z.  In fact, with those specific causes and conditions, how could things have possibly gone any other way?"

To be clear, Radical Acceptance of causes and conditions does not excuse unacceptable, inappropriate or unwholesome behaviors.  It does not.

But, it can help the individual who has felt hurt or harmed by those actions to move forward and remember that, as Mary Poppins says in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins played by the actress Julie Andrews as the "practically perfect" British nanny to the 2 children she is taking care of:

Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of their own, can't see past the end of his nose.

I have to admit, I still don't fully understand the Buddhist concept of karma, but sometimes I wonder, if the baby steps I have begun to take in forgiveness might have something to do with this idea.

Lama Surya Das, a Western Buddhist teacher and author in the Dzogchen Tibetan tradition, writes in his 2003 book Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be: Lessons on Change, Loss and Spiritual  Transformation:

I am a Buddhist and, as such, I accept the reality of karma and the law of cause and effect. It makes good sense to me. But I also know that the laws of karma are far more complex than any simple sitcom version. We are living not only with our own personal karma, but also with the karma of every other being we meet...And of course, it isn't only about individual karma; there is group karma as well.

And what is a family if not a group?

Who we are is who we were.

But before you begin a deep dive into your family archives (which may yield only a rough sketch anyway if your family is as tight-lipped as mine) in order to dig up every who, what, when, where and why. Consider this:

Only omniscient awareness can totally comprehend causation with all its details, interconnection, and ramifications.  The Buddha said that only an omniscient Buddha, a perfectly enlightened and fully awakened being, could understand the myriad causes and conditions that bring about the color of a single peacock's feather.

(Also from Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be.)

So as long as I remain quite a ways away from "omniscient awareness," it is more likely that I may need to intersect my forgiveness practices with my faith practices.

I pray it may be so.

[This is Part One of a series of Blog Posts on the topic of Forgiving Our Ancestors. Stay tuned for Part II.]

National Existentialism & Other Complicated Truths in a Spiritual Democracy

In moment of exasperation, I shot off this text to a couple of friends of mine last Friday:

 

So let’s recap.

It’s ‘America First’ except:

Democrats, poor people, people without health insurance, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, victims of police violence, victims of gun violence, immigrants from Mexico, immigrants from Central America, immigrants from majority Muslim nations (except Saudi Arabia), Cabinet members who refuse to perjure themselves, Republicans who vote their conscience, non-gender conforming  military personnel, anyone who is LGBT, journalists from any news outlet (except FOX News), the Boy scouts, and/or anyone who has a differing opinion of any kind.

My goodness! With a long (growing) list like that, who is going to be left to put ‘first?’

This move was actually not very like me.

As someone who does not use Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter, it is quite rare that my impulsivity and emotional mind goes public.

But to be fair to myself, this question of: What is America?, is one that I have been asking myself since January of this year.

January 21^st to be exact.

Because that was the day America Ferrera, the American actress and activist of Honduran immigrant parents said this at the Women’s March in Washington D.C. the day after the 2017 Presidential Inauguration:

It’s been a heart-wrenching time to be a woman and an immigrant in this country ― a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday. But the president is not America. ...We are America.

In past blog posts I have written about the idea, albeit idealistic at best, of a spiritual democracy in which we the people are not “merely” striving for a legal democracy, but rather a spiritual democracy in which we aspire for a just democracy (which means legal + moral) that is a wholehearted “we” rather than a democracy that is solely an “I.”

Contemplating this utopian democracy of my dreams, I have to wonder, outside of the political circuit, what phrases like: “America first” and “We are America” would manifest to be in day-to-day life.

And I’m not the only one who is contemplating this.

Just one month after Ms. Ferrera made her bold statement to a crowd of hundreds of thousands of Americans, I read this by another American, the Iranian-American author, religious studies scholar, and star of CNN’s Believer Reza Aslan, in Vanity Fair.com

We are in the midst of a crisis of identity in which we are trying to figure out who we are as a nation...[Americans]who feel as though their privileged position in society had been shaken are reacting to the natural progress of human society.

There is that “we” again.

And he went on to imply that this “crisis of identity,” if worked through effectively, is not in-and-of itself a problem.  In fact, he said:

It creates more fertile ground for larger conversations about American identity…Instead of dealing with these issues on an issue-by-issue basis, I think it’s easier now to draw larger conclusions.

I like that Mr. Aslan uses this word “identity” when referring to our nation.

More often than not, “identity” is a word to describe the self (the individual), but what if the self, the individual, is also a collective we?  In the creation of identity, how does the “I” influence the “we” and how does the “we” influence the “I”?

I was thinking about these questions recently while I was reading Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s 1988 book The Sun My Heart: From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation. 

In the book he said:

Meditators realize that all phenomena interpenetrate and inter-are with all other phenomena, so in their everyday lives they look at a chair or an orange differently from most people. When they look at mountains and rivers, they see that ‘rivers are no longer rivers and mountains are no longer mountains.’ Mountains ‘have entered’ rivers, and rivers ‘have entered’ mountains (interpenetration). Mountains become rivers, and rivers become mountains (interbeing). However, when they want to go for a swim, they have to go into the river and not climb the mountain. When they return to everyday life, ‘mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers.

This excerpt made me wonder, in a world of interpenetration, inter-are and interbeing, where would the lines be drawn between a national identity versus a personal identity?

Even for a neophyte like me, it’s hard to have these types of conversations and not think about ideas and philosophies like Existentialism, which, after researching on the internet for several days now, I’ve come to understand as the choice of an individual to freely give meaning to life and live authentically.

But what if it is not the individual who is in a “existential dilemma” in which s/he  feels a state of confusion, disorientation and lack of clarity of their own personal priorities and values,  but rather an entire nation? 

And is it even possible to ever completely separate the two? (Again, Thich Nhat Hanh’s “the mountain and the river…”)

And what if, to complicate this even further, we happen to be living in a time when, unlike  the cultural revolution of the 1960’s,individuals not only do not feel confusion, disorientation and lack of clarity of their own personal priorities and values, but rather extreme certainty? Where it feels like we are trying to form an Organizational Vision among board members who’s shared reality of total disagreement in opinions is the only thing that can be agreed upon.

Therein lies the problem of effectively working through a national existential dilemma: the individuals and groups that make up the national whole do not feel confused and disoriented, and therefore refuse (or out-right deny) to productively address the problem.

In other words, if I am the “mountain,” I still must work through and with the part of me that is the "river.”  All of us must.  Otherwise, I don’t know what.

It sounds weird, but during these times of national existential crisis, when I am contemplating my feelings of powerlessness as a teeny-tiny part of the collective “we,” I find it helpful to re-watch historical movies (I’m a visual person) that dramatically depict this national tension.

The time period I look to most is the abolition of slavery.

Through films like Amistad, Amazing Grace and Lincoln, I am able to retrace poignant moments in our history that to me represent periods that we were able to (painfully) move through a national (or global) existential dilemma to reach a new plateau of consciousness. 

Probably in some ways it is also to soothe my own anxiety because, as historical pieces, I know how it all will turn out. 

But also, it helps me to hold perspective and a measured hope that we will get through this period of democratic growing pains as well- even if I still catastrophize about fascism taking over each time I turn on the news.

In an interview with NPR in spring of this year, Bono, the activist, philanthropist and  Irish lead singer and lyricist of the rock band U2, reiterated his own take on the question: What is America? that I have always been drawn to.

He said:

There's two Americas: There's the mythic America and the real America. We were obsessed by America at the time. America's a sort of promised-land for Irish people — and then, a sort of potentially broken promised land.

If the Declaration of Independence is like the liner notes of America, we're like annoying fans that follow politicians into the bathroom and say, ‘But it says here, 'We pledge our sacred honor.' What's that about?’ And people suffer us talking about America because we love it so much. Rather arrogantly, we don't think you own it. We think America is an idea that belongs to people who need it most.

On July 4^th of this year, our nation’s 241^st birthday, PBS wrote a piece called “Who is America?”  It began with this introduction:

In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington described his countrymen as ‘citizens, by birth or choice.’ At the time, the nation had roughly 4 million people, including women and slaves…The United States’ population now stands at 325 million. Amid new questions of American identity, this July Fourth seemed like a good idea to look at who exactly makes up America, whether by birth or choice. And how it is forecast to change.

Citizens, by birth or choice.

So, then what is America? Who is America? Is it a people? An idea? A geographic area (that is a whole other blog post for another day!)? And if we don’t know or can’t agree, how can we possibly make meaning of our collective lives and live together authentically?

For myself, in order to arrive at my own complicated truth, I again, turn to the wisdom Thich Nhat Hanh  who says in his chapter “Neither Form Nor Emptiness” in  The Sun My Heart: From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation:

The notion of inter-origination (paratantra) is very close to living reality. It annihilates dualistic concepts, one/many, inside/outside, time/space, mind/matter, and so forth, which the mind uses to confine, divide, and shape reality. The notion of inter-origination can be used not only to destroy habits of cutting up reality, but also to bring about a direct experience of reality. As a tool, however, it should not be considered a form of reality in itself.

Paratantra is the very nature of living reality, the absence of an essential self. Just as a triangle exists only because three lines intersect each other, you cannot say any thing exists in itself. Because they have no independent identity, all phenomena are described as empty (sunya). This does not mean that phenomena are absent, only that they are empty of an essential self, of a permanent identity independent of other phenomena. In the same way, in bootstrap physics the word ‘particles’ does not mean three-dimensional specks which exist independently of one another.

The word ‘emptiness’ here is different from the everyday term. It transcends the usual concepts of emptiness and form. To be empty is not to be non-existent. It is to be devoid of a permanent identity.

So perhaps then, the path to a national identity is to let go of a national identity, and instead aspire to inspire a consciousness that represents the global vision of the Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama: Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

Then, we could begin to walk the walk of 20th century French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Satre's claim that "existence precedes essence" or maybe what Unitarian Universalist's propose:"Deeds not Creeds."

It seems to me, that would be a pretty good start.

May it be so.