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| Dorothy Parker with her found pencil |
A church member sent me a link to this essay by
Dorothy Parker that was published in the September 16, 1924 edition of Life
magazine; I know exactly how she feels. After my burst of creativity last month
(well, the subject was sex—who doesn’t love to talk about that?) I have been lying stagnant, metaphorically blaming my lack
of words on the loss of a pencil, but here the laptop sits, bold as brass in
front of me, the cursor blinking accusingly on this empty open document so now
I, too, must ask myself, what the hell am
I going to write about?
It’s not for lack of interesting issues--- there is
the 50th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, and
those who were martyred then and those who were lives were changed as a result
of participating in that historic event; there’s the correlation to today, with
the Department of Justice report finding the police and city officials of Ferguson, MO
guilty of a pattern of systemic racist practices in their conduct toward people
of color, even while exonerating the white officer, Darren White who shot and
killed Mike Brown, an unarmed 18 year old Black man; there’s the irony of the
State Supreme Court of Alabama ruling that forbids local jurisdictions to issue
marriage licenses to same sex couples, ignoring the federal, constitutionally
upheld mandate for that state to do so; there’s the sad news that on the eve of
the historic commemoration of Selma, the day before our President, Barack
Obama, was to speak to the enduring legacy of Selma, that another unarmed black
man, 19 year old Tony Robbins, was shot and killed by white police officer Matt
Kenny. We don’t know the details of what happened or why; hopefully the truth—such
as it is nowadays, as slippery as an eel and twice as squirmy—will be
discovered, but until then what is shocking to me is the number of racist
websites that completely trammel over this young man’s death by pointing to his
arrest record and calling the story the false narrative. This is so familiar to
how female rape victims are treated that it sickens me.
Which reminds me that March is National Women’s
History Month and that this past Sunday was the International Women’s Day, this
year’s theme being Make it Happen, a heartily optimistic cry in the face of so
much legislature on both a state and national level which seeks to strip away
women’s rights to have control over their own health care decisions, and in the
face of the World Heath Organization statistics that proclaim that “violence against women - particularly
intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women - are major public
health problems and violations of women's human rights.”
And I won’t
even mention the recent house bill 1025 that passed in the Oklahoma House of
Representatives that would end secular marriage and restrict marriage to people
of faith and mandate that all marriage licenses must be approved by a member of
the clergy. I know: clearly they didn’t think that one through. Still.
Let me
just say: it was much more fun writing about sex. As I think of all the things
happening in our world I can empathize with Dorothy’s amazing ability to
sidetrack herself with trivial thoughts and fruitless desires. And I’m also
really glad that during this Lenten season, we at All Souls are learning about
how to be more compassionate, following the rubric in Karen Armstrong’s book, “Twelve
Steps to a Compassionate Life.” It’s been good for me to remember that, though
cynicism or despair might be our default responses to the events and issues of
our day, though it can be easy to reduce the news to caricatures of the
players, rather than seeing the humanity of all involved—the shooters and the
shot, the fearful legislators and the people impacted by their fear-based laws,
the women who have been abused and the men (and sometimes women) who abuse them—there
is another choice; the choice to respond with compassion, a choice to dig deep
into the messy, chaotic, sometimes brutish experience of being human and to
seek love, not hate; kindness, not cruelty; justice, not judgment.
In the
seventh step of learning compassion, Armstrong invites us to acknowledge how little
we know of others—their culture, faiths, politics, love—and to seek to broaden
our perspective to make room for the other. I have to tell you, this can be
hard for me. I want to lampoon the Oklahoma lawmakers, scoff at explanations
given by white police officers who shoot unarmed black men; I want to deny them
the same humanity that I lift up in their victims. Yet compassion is a two way
street—really it’s more of a cloverleaf interchange, with people getting on and
off the freeway and going in all sorts of directions. Compassion is a country dance, one
in which our partners change according to the pattern of the song and we can’t
choose with whom we will dance next, we simply must try to dance graciously with each partner the song puts
before us, changing our steps to match theirs, inviting them to try ours.
What the
hell should I write about? Compassion. Kindness. Love. There’s never enough
said about those. Here I go now.
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