“Age and Ageism regarding the Pandemic and Presidents”

February 26, 2023    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

“Age and Ageism regarding the Pandemic and Presidents”

David Wallace-Wells, NYT December 7, 2022

“given the underlying age skew, vaccinated people in their late 80s have a similar risk of Covid death as never-vaccinated 70-year-olds. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a pandemic of the unvaccinated, it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a pandemic of the old.

 

The picture that resulted was hugely relieving to most of us without being, at the highest levels, misleading: Vaccination and natural immunity had indeed dramatically reduced the country’s overall mortality risk from Covid. But while it’s comforting to believe that protection is a choice, for some populations, it isn’t. And in moving pretty swiftly from treating everyone as high risk to treating everyone as low risk, we neglected to pay much attention to the differential of risk: that even if the average American had reduced his or her chances of dying from Covid by a factor of five or 10, 300 or more Americans might still be dying each day for many months, and there were probably some targeted things to do about that.”

 

It feels to me, that when I am going to deliver a sermon that is entirely out of sync with public conversation and thought that I almost need to quote Lewis Carrol’s famous poem in Through the Looking Glass:

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

 

 

It is not uncommon for me to take my Sunday morning time to offer my answers to questions no one has asked me but today I may be wandering more into the comparison of two things that are different, like cabbages and kings, but which may be related in oddly disturbing ways.

You never get to finish one election before the talking heads in our 24 hour news cycle insist upon speculating, nearly full time, about the next one. At present, it seems to be nearly unavoidable that Joe Biden will run for re-election in 2024, when he will be 82 years old, and if Donald Trump manages to secure the Republican nomination again, he will be 78 years old on election day. Bernie Sanders will be 83 but I know that none of you want to hear me talk about him anymore. But 78 and 82 are pretty old, older than any presidential candidates in the past. But how old is too old? 

 

No one asked me in 2020 if Biden was too old, but if you had asked me, I would have replied that he certainly was. He is 10 years older than I am and I know that I am too old to take on anything that would make me have to put in fifty or sixty hours of productive work every week and would frequently keep me from taking an afternoon nap. However, I think that we can all say, that had you asked me in 2020 about Biden’s age, that I would have been wrong. As history has delt its cards to us these past two years, with a hot war in Europe and the threat of an invasion of Taiwan by China on the horizon, Biden’s decades of experience in foreign policy have been crucial. In fact, I don’t know who would have been better to have had in the White House in the face of these very serious threats. 

 

He isn’t a genius, he isn’t a scholar, he is a horrible public speaker, and he is an absolute gaff machine, but I and a whole lot of other people underestimated him and I can say, in all humility, that I am glad we have had his wrinkled hand on the rudder these past two years. 

When a football quarterback is still on the field at 40 years old, that is national news. Serena Williams played professional tennis until she was 41 and commentators acted like that was a miracle. But we’re contemplating giving the nuclear football to a guy who would be 86 when he finished his second term. I’m not saying he couldn’t do it, but I am 66 and my daughter won’t let me eat on her sofa anymore; I’m just sayin. 

 

Trump is not qualified to manage a hotdog stand, in his 70’s and I doubt he was any better when he was younger. But it should be apparent that Biden had skills in his 70’s that he would not have had in his 30’s or 40’s. There are things that people only learn through decades of experience. Our culture tends to worship youth, beauty, vitality, and, to put it plainly, “hotness.” But most of life is not about being sexy. Sometimes what we need most is wisdom and experience.

 

Early in December, the New York Times published an opinion piece by David Wallace-Wells that takes a very honest look at a neglected truth of the Covid pandemic. We have all started to act like the pandemic is over. Almost no one wears a mask, not even in crowded Christmas shopping department stores. We still have about 300 people dying from Covid every single day, nearly 10,000 people a month, making Covid one of the third leading cause of death in America, and we act like it is over.

 

Last January, President Biden said that Covid had largely become a pandemic of the unvaccinated and while being unvaccinated certainly increases your chances of either getting Covid or dying from it, the truth is that most of the people who are dying of Covid now have been vaccinated, it is just that 90 percent of the deaths are among people who are 65 and older. 

An 80 year old who is vaccinated and boosted has a greater risk of dying from Covid than a 70 year old who isn’t vaccinated. Age has always been a huge factor in the lethal risk of Covid but it is even more true now. I have lately crossed the line, being now older than 65 and I have been vaccinated and I have had four booster shots. There are lab rats at Pfizer-Biontech that haven’t had as many vaccine jabs as I have had, and I got Covid – twice! I got the flu shot, and for the first time in my life, I just had the flu. The vaccines may have kept me out of the hospital, but they sure didn’t keep me in the racquetball court!

 

Which raises the question of whether we should have been so concerned about getting air purifiers in our schools when it was the people living in nursing facilities who were the most likely to die. I understand that we reflexively value the lives of the young more than the lives of the elderly but I’m saying that the lives of senior citizens also have value.

 

David Wallace-Wells reminds us in his article that conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, as well as the lieutenant-governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, waved off the threat of the pandemic early in 2020 because only senior citizens were at risk. As if these one million deaths do not really matter because those people were going to die anyway. Everyone is going to die. The mortality rate is still 100%, but just because you may only have a decade of life left does not mean that your life is without value. 

 

Consider this: Martin Luther King, Jr. was 26 years old when he completed his doctorate in theology from Boston University. He was the pastor at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He had been hired by Dexter Ave. after they had accepted the resignation of his predecessor, Vernon Johns, who was always at odds with many members of the church because he was too political. King was hired with the solemn injunction to stick to the Bible and not get into politics. 

 

But six months after he was awarded his doctorate, just six months later, some housekeeper in Montgomery, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and move to the back of the bus. Now, that was not an accident, Rosa Parks had been preparing for some kind of civil rights protests for a long time, but it had nothing to do with Martin Luther King. But a few days later, when leaders of the black congregations in Montgomery gathered to discuss how to use the public furor over Rosa Parks’ arrest to the fullest, King didn’t even plan to go and had to be talked into leaving his home and infant child to attend the meeting.

 

At the meeting, older pastors who were very competitive with one another for recognition in the community realized that they had to reach some compromise in appointing a spokesperson for their protest and they couldn’t agree on giving that honor to any of the most established pastors, so they went with a safe choice, someone who wouldn’t steal the spotlight . . . they recruited Martin Luther King to be their spokesperson. 

 

Everything you know about Martin Luther King, Jr., all of his speeches, marches, all of his books, the Nobel Peace Prize, everything you know about him took place over the next 12 years before he was murdered on April 4, 1968 when he was just 39 years old. It never ceased to amaze me that one of the most influential preachers in history would not have been considered to be old enough to be hired by most churches today. 

By contrast, if you look at the timeline of Gandhi’s life, though Gandhi protested racial discrimination in Great Britain and began writing and discerning his ultimate mission of liberation of India earlier in life, his real public notoriety, when he led the famous salt march in 1930, Gandhi was 61 years old. His imprisonments, protests, books and demonstrations continued for the next seventeen years until India was given autonomy when Gandhi was 78 years old. 

 

If Gandhi had been 39 when he was assassinated, as King was, none of us would have ever heard of Gandhi. If King had lived to be 78, well, who knows what he might have done. 

 

There are things that only the young can do but there are things which call age and experience as well. Ben Franklin was 70 when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Nelson Mandela was 76 when he emerged from prison to be the president of South Africa. Mother Theresa was 69 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize. 

 

The young and the healthy may choose to live as if things like Covid or the flu offer no real threat to them but even if they have no reason to fear infection for themselves, they live in a world in which we can be thankful for the contributions of people like Gandhi, or Joe Biden, or Mother Theresa. We are all connected and, we will all eventually be old if something doesn’t kill us first. 

 

People are sometimes shocked when I remind them that the mortality rate still is what it always has been, 100% but none other than John Donne said it first, albeit rather more elegantly in his famous poem:

For whom the Bell Tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

 

Open to Change

Open to Change: Activism Fatigue, Self-Efficacy, and Kindness in Community David Ketchum February 19, 2023 Watch the video HERE

        My life has been filled with a fair bit of change and transition over the last few years, surrounded by lots of uncertainty. That has made for a natural time for reflection, and already being the type of person disposed toward reflection, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time thinking about the shape of my life: the decisions I’ve made, dreams I’ve chased, failures I’ve felt, and unlooked blessings found along the way. Like probably many of you, my life hasn’t taken the course I expected it would take, but I am profoundly grateful for where I find myself now and for the paths that still lie open in front of me. 

        At the heart of that journey has been maintaining spiritual and reflective practices that support my aspirations, especially those related to kindness, wisdom, and justice. For decades now, for example, I repeat a simple aspiration before I meditate: 

“May I be with these next moments with openness and curiosity, with gratitude and kindness, so that wisdom can arise.” Those words have soaked into my heart-mind and become a familiar friend. After a few years, I found that they followed me off the cushion. Practicing with them intentionally made them available to me when I needed them during the day, when they can invite me back to the present moment, especially when I begin to feel overwhelmed by the uncertainties and sufferings of life. 

  Practices like this have been more important to me than I even realized. I was looking back at old journal entries and discovered that, time and again, I have had to make conscious decisions to not give up. I don’t know how universal this is but, given the conversations I’ve had with others and the data that is available on activism fatigue and burnout, it feels relevant. In 2021, Mikayla Tillery pointed out that “Activism fatigue tends to spike after notable political action” and that: 

“What makes activism fatigue that much more overwhelming than traditional burnout is that activists’ work is tied to identity, injustice, and agency. The political is personal, so the weight of our oppression is a constant stressor that cannot be lifted without our liberation. This pressure combined with the current expectations of selflessness, martyrdom and unfettered loyalty within activist spaces make burnout nearly inevitable.”

Perhaps most importantly, she wrote about how social change actions and movements often include a culture that pressures us to push ourselves and our limitations past a healthy point in order to achieve a goal or “reach a finish line”: 

“When we juxtapose the low valleys of burnout with the mountains of celebration, it justifies the idea that our suffering is needed to deserve success. Without addressing the root issue of activism fatigue, celebrations will only habituate burnout. / Eventually, the celebrations will become meaningless, and a once-insatiable yearning for justice will pale to insurmountable exhaustion.” 

        I felt those words in my body, and I remembered so many moments where I have experienced it within myself or witnessed it in others. For example, when I moved back to Missouri 2010, I was full of energy and ideas. I had spent three wonderful years working with innovative peace and justice organizations in Cambodia, and I was both hopeful and confident that I would be able to translate those experiences into something wonderful here. But southwest Missouri has been a very difficult place for me to live and a challenging place to cultivate communities where justice and compassion can thrive. I have a clear memory of bottoming out during the period of time between when Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and when our local city rallied to repeal an ordinance that extended basic civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in April 2015. That was an exhausting, heart-breaking, devastating year. 

        But, reading my journals, I saw that I was already struggling with the beginnings of burnout just two years after moving here. In December 2012, I wrote that: 

“Since moving back to the United States in 2010, I have felt again that one of the biggest challenges of living here is simply maintaining this kind of confidence. The problems are so complex, the cultural violence is so entrenched, and the system is so well-oiled and on such a huge scale that it is easy to be discouraged. Still, I have to keep going. The alternative to seeking a more peaceful way in the world is no alternative at all.”

I was evidently giving myself a little pep talk; if the stakes are high enough, you can’t give up, right? But I was also doing some good work. In the rest of the journal entry, I described studying the work of Albert Bandura on self-efficacy. Bandura famously wrote that: 

“People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.” (Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, 1997)

In my work in community development, we had to focus on transforming failure into learning and growth. Especially in that field, and in my work in peace and conflict programming, there are so many variables that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how things will happen in the real world. You have to learn as you go and make adjustments. Self-efficacy is a key skill, because you a certain amount of failure is practically inevitable. We did our best to build that into our organizational cultures, from the way we wrote job descriptions to the way we handled monitoring and evaluation. It was especially important that we were able to talk about the things that didn’t go as planned, instead of feeling pressure to hide them. I have worked with organizations where this wasn’t the case, and the tremendous amount of pressure, often tied to funding, took a lot of the joy out of the work while also undermining the health of the programs and organization. If you can’t recognize and handle failure, you can’t learn; if you can’t learn, you can’t respond in wise and just ways to all the unexpected twists and turns in life. 

        Creating those personal values and organizational culture, then, needs to be a priority. But it is not automatic, and it is something our broader society struggles to do. Wrestling with that very question in 2012, I was especially interested in the way Sharon Salzberg, an insight meditation teacher, connected self-efficacy to community and kindness. In The Force of Kindness, Salzberg explained that “Kindness points to the core of what it means to be alive, which is to be connected.” We depend on one another from birth. And when we experience that connection with kindness, we see a reflection of “our own value.” We learn that we also can and even have a “right to be happy.” And another person’s kindness, rooted in their connection to us, communicates “the unspoken message of their efforts – that we are worth the bother.” And that feeling of our mutual value and worth, grounded in and growing out of our shared connection and kindness, supports developing self-efficacy: 

"This is the difference between pain and hopelessness, between distress and bitterness, between suffering and despair - sorrows or difficulties arise, yet we have some sense of confidence that we can find a way to work through them." 

        In my journal, I reflected that, “Reading Sharon's words this morning was a very kind encouragement to see the difference between pain and hopelessness. I feel really grateful for remembering that and a renewed sense of confidence that we CAN find a way that does not sacrifice justice or peace.” Connecting kindness with self-efficacy has been important to me ever since, but I hadn’t remembered where and when that insight had taken root in me. Looking back at this journal entry, I realized that cultivating this insight was also a demonstration of joining kindness with self-efficacy. In a moment of time when I was discouraged and unsure if I could muster the energy to keep going, I practiced kindness toward myself. I took the time to discern “the difference between pain and hopelessness, between distress and bitterness, between suffering and despair.” Taking the time to do that work allowed me to adjust course and keep going. That was encouraging to see in my past self, and added to my current confidence that I can find ways to work with and through difficulties as they arise. 

In translating the Discourse on Happiness, Thich Nhat Hanh chose the words “To persevere and be open to change” to describe this factor in cultivating “the greatest happiness.” Looking through the lens of my 2012 journal, I understand that description in a different and deeper way. It takes those personal values and organizational culture to feel and be safe enough to open to change. In his commentary on the discourse, Thich Nhat Hanh acknowledged that “It is incredibly difficult” to hear it “when our brothers and our sisters point out our faults”. Exploring some of the reasons why this is often the case is another topic. But recommitting to the kinds of practices and processes that make opening to change possible is something that we don’t have to wait to do. 

In Tillery’s reflections, she noted two prominent reasons behind social justice burnout: underappreciation and “a lack of self care and community care.” This is a good starting place for us to ask: when have I felt safe enough to be honest about my struggles and limitations? When have I been safe enough to open to change? Community that is characterized by gratitude and care provides a container for us to heal and grow. This emphasis on healing and growing, at least in my experience, feels very different than an emphasis on self-improvement. It is more relational. When I am wounded, it brings a healing presence that includes grief, and my wounds are not understood as inconvenient obstacles to productivity. My healing becomes part of the work, and my growth becomes part of the work. And so does your healing and growth. 

        And this includes even and especially the painful work of transforming our internalized oppression and internalized dominance. These unhealed places in us are the source of some of our most difficult problems in sustaining healthy community. They make it almost impossible for marginalized people to feel and be safe enough to belong, and often turn that belonging into the constant work of managing pain from overexposure to people who haven’t done the work. As I’ve encouraged us to practice in the past, 

  “Assume you have internalized oppression and domination. In my experience, the default assumption is often that only ‘bad’ people have internalized oppression and domination. So let’s change the measure: justice-minded folks actively work to recognize their implicit biases and are intentional about changing their habits of thinking, speaking, and acting to align with their values.” With practice and over time, we can change the script, becoming open to change. A wise, justice-minded person receives correction as a gift, because we know how precious it is to get an opportunity to practice in a way that brings freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion. A compassionate person receives correction as a gift, because we want to reduce the suffering and harm we cause in ourselves and in the world, while increasing our kindness. 

        When the community is healthy, then we want to know when we have done something hurtful, and we are not threatened by hearing about it. With this context, we can hear the fuller comment by Thich Nhat Hanh, because we understand how it becomes possible for opening to change, learning, healing, and growing is a gift to all of us: 

“When we can yield to reason and let someone correct us without becoming angry or resentful, then we will find that happiness remains with us. It is incredibly difficult, but when our brothers and our sisters point out our faults, the best thing we can do is put our palms together and bow in appreciation, with graciousness on our faces and in our hearts.” (from Two Treasures)

  This is more vital than many of us have considered, and too easily forgotten. Prioritizing communities where good-heartedness becomes the norm, expressed through gratitude and kindness, is essential for both our personal and collective well-being. Returning to Salzberg’s insights connecting self-efficacy and kindness in community, we remember that “in the absence of receiving this kindness, something in us does die, at least for a while, unless and until it can be restored through love.” If we take this seriously, we can connect this to all the ways that our unhealthy, unjust society has been killing us off. Knowing those tender places better is painful, and often enraging, but it also opens the door for us to learn to love ourselves and each other in ways that can restore and transform that suffering into understanding and compassion. 

        And this is where I’d like to add at least a third element, that of trust. Our gratitude and kindness help us create this safe environment where we can be open to change, but we also need to be intentional and explicit about how to sustain that safety. Trust is something we create and re-create together. This is why we’ve emphasized -  

“the importance of centering the voices and needs of marginalized people. Oppression is the most severe and cruel normalization of harm, and it destroys the possibility of trust. This means that prioritizing justice and equity are part of the restoration of trust and the healing of both people and society. Similarly, the wellbeing of marginalized and oppressed people is the measure of the health of a society. Any work we are doing that ignores this dynamic will ultimately undermine our efforts, whatever our intentions.” 

When we are able to create that kind of trust, sustained by gratitude and kindness, then openness to change is more natural and joyful. We feel freedom to breathe and be ourselves, and we can thrive. 

Salzberg called this: 

“one of the great fruits of the kindness we receive from others – it supports our sense of being someone deserving of love, someone who can in turn accomplish something, who can vanquish difficulties, who can make it through the travails of life, who can be a good person.” 

This is a more sustainable, even regenerative pathway for changing ourselves and our society. It connects us to a shared vision of justice and equity, where every voice can be heard and need can be heard. I know I repeat those words often, but I need to repeat them. Nurturing that aspiration keeps me grounded, even when the difficulties are overwhelming. And when I stay open to change, I know that I am holding a door open for others to change, too. This is true, even when things don’t go the way I hope, when life-saving legislation is overturned, when the powers-that-be protect a violent and corrupt system, when the change we desperately need seems so far away. With kindness joined with self-efficacy, I know my capacity for change is not a limited commodity. I am part of a long line of people who refused to give up, who nourished their own capacity to grow in love and understanding in themselves and each other, and who passed on that aspiration for justice and compassion to all of us who are willing to follow in their footsteps. I can do the same, and so can you. 

From Mindless Consumption to Grateful Contentment

From Mindless Consumption to Grateful Contentment David Ketchum February 12, 2023 Watch the video HERE

There are some conversations with your mother that you can never forget. One of those, for me, was on the occasion of my twenty-first birthday. I had rushed through my university studies, but not so much because of some special educational virtue on my part. The truth was that I thoroughly disliked the whole experience, I didn’t know how long I could endure it, and I thought graduating as quickly as possible was preferable to dropping out. So I graduated early and found myself moving west for graduate school at the tender age of twenty. I turned twenty one while living close to Highway 1 in northern California. An eccentric friend of mine thought my relative youth made for a funny anecdote and couldn’t pass up the chance to take me for a celebration dinner at a winery, where I could take my first sip of alcohol.

        Growing up, I was taught that drinking alcohol was fundamentally wrong. My Southern Baptist church officially condemned it, and there were enough tales of caution to keep a child both fascinated and terrified. Growing up in the 1980s, our public school experience was also incomplete without visits from presentations from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the Just Say No! campaign added drug use to the list of dangerous, taboo items to avoid. Some of my extended family members struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse, so I had heard and sometimes seen the real world risks involved. Still, there were also voices calling for moderation, including my Dad. And we all knew not to touch the bottle with the balloon on top in Grandma’s refrigerator, which appeared each year after the grapes she grew in the backyard ripened.

 

       So I accepted my friend’s invitation and we headed up the coast. Dinner was lovely, and the wine was expensive. It was white wine, and that’s about all I can tell you. It turned out that I did not have a discerning palate, and my friend was simultaneously amused and disappointed that I wasn’t suitably impressed by the quality and taste. Still, I had fun, and I called home later to tell my parents how I’d celebrated. When I mentioned the wine, you could hear the silence on the other end. My mom was not angry; she was scared. “Oh God, David, you’re going to become an alcoholic.” 
    
        I thought it was funny and laughed it off. I assured her that I was not in danger, if for no other reason than that I was a poor student and, whatever little spending money I might have, I liked buying and reading books much more than I could ever enjoy buying and drinking alcohol. (This, by the way, has been true as long as I can remember. Given the choice between most things and a book, and I will usually buy a book. According to my Dad, this habit began when I was a child. At the grocery store, he would give me a choice between getting a candy bar and getting a Little Golden book. He resolved that the first time I chose the candy bar would be the last time he offered the choice to me. And so my childhood bookshelf was overfilled with those tales of poky puppies, shy kittens, snuggly bunnies, and especially The Monster at the End of this Book.) 

        But this did not comfort my mom, and we had later had a long conversation about it. Her concern was not the rigid, “you’ll displease God and go to hell if you drink” message I’d heard enough times. Instead, her plea was more of a “I’ve seen too many people get addicted and create a hell of their lives” message. And that is, tragically, true enough. And although I have never personally struggled with a substance use disorder, I appreciated her care, and I recognized that care like hers is one of the reasons I have not struggled. I was glad to have voices in my life that taught a different way to think about these kinds of decisions and habits, instead of the two oversimplified choices I was otherwise given: harsh condemnation or unbridled consumption. 

        I recognized my mother’s voice when I read two verses in the Discourse on Happiness, that bring out a similar contrast: 

“To refrain from what is unwholesome, 
To abstain from all intoxicants,
And to be steadfast in good qualities,
This is the greatest good fortune.

“Respect and humility,
Contentment and gratitude,
And the timely hearing of Dharma:
This is the greatest good fortune.”
(tr. by Bhikkhu Brahmali)

At first glance, it may seem like an opportunity for more of the same moralizing that I grew up hearing. But a closer look reveals a lot more. If we want to hear it, we often need to begin with examining what gets in the way. For many of us, restraint and renunciation are often negative experiences, grounded in a life-denying and antagonistic attitude. This is especially the case where there is a high degree of control, often exerted through coercion, threat, shame, and guilt. Anyone who has experienced that kind of restraint is unlikely to associate it with happiness. It’s much more likely that we’ll get caught in a desire to get rid of or annihilate whatever we’ve come to view as the problem. This often involves our threat-response: we’ve identified an obstacle to our happiness, and we think that we must avoid - or destroy - whatever is in the way. Our capacity for identifying dangers helps keep us safe, but attaching to that kind of craving easily leads to suffering. It’s not a recipe for happiness, and it can make enemies out of our experiences and our friends. 
Instead, refraining from what is unwholesome focuses on the impacts of what we think, say, and do. As I've mentioned before, our skillfulness in not harming one another depends in large part on “our ability to pay attention and practice discernment.” Instead of getting stuck in a loop of approving or disapproving, praising or blaming, we give ourselves “the opportunity to understand our needs and our experiences,” and then to act on that understanding. And this is why refraining “from what is unwholesome,” from what causes harm to others, is linked with abstaining “from all intoxicants.” Discernment requires a clear mind. Whatever clouds the mind can make it easier to either not perceive the harm that could take place, or to justify harming yourself or another person. It can be challenging enough to understand ourselves, each other, and our experiences when we have a clear head; adding another layer of fogginess makes it that much harder. It’s the same reason we have rules about using heavy machinery or driving a car when taking certain medications. We want to be safe, and to make safe decisions. This is a helpful and simple way to make decisions about using intoxicants, whether you completely abstain or use them responsibly. When using them would impair your ability to make a good decision or protect the safety of yourself and others, don’t use them. 

          Reflecting in this way, we can also see that there are other ways that we can delude our minds and make it difficult to have a clear head. This is why, for example, the Plum Village tradition enlarges the focus from intoxicants in particular to “unmindful consumption” in general. You can be intoxicant-free and still cloud the mind with ideas and habits that make it very difficult to make healthy, happy choices. So, while the Mindfulness Training includes the aspiration to not use drugs and alcohol, it puts that aspiration in the context of not harming one another. It concludes by resolving to “contemplate interbeing and consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and well-being in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society and the Earth.” So, again, this is a helpful and simple way to help us make decisions. Whatever we are doing, we pay attention. If doing that impairs our ability to make a good decision or protect the safety of ourselves and others, we can make a choice: “refrain from what is unwholesome.”  

 
       This kind of framework also helps us move from an oversimplified condemnation of using drugs and alcohol to a deeper understanding of how our unmindful consumption is linked to so much suffering. For example, in 2010, there were 21,089 opioid-involved overdose deaths. In 2021, there were 80,411. Those are terrifying, tragic numbers. But it is now such a common problem that I have friends who are trained to administer Narcan in the case of witnessing an overdose. I am so grateful that they offer this compassionate service, but there is a shadow here. That we need them to do this at all points to a terrible reality. 

To reflect on one of the social factors involved in that reality, we have a growing awareness of the role of self-medication and its connection to substance use disorders. Many of my friends self-medicate, which is consistent with statistics from 2018 that over 20% of people with mood or anxiety disorders self-medicated with alcohol or drugs. We also cannot separate self-medication from experiences of violence, abuse, injustice, and oppression. Sometimes, relying on alcohol and drugs to cope with the unbearable may feel like the only option available. Sometimes, a human being feels like they cannot bear to see things clearly. But in these situations, the root of the problem is not in the intoxicants, but in the failure of our society to provide the basic medical and social supports people need in order to enjoy life and thrive.

       Unfortunately, this trend seems likely to continue. Discussing studies by the Pew Research Center, Meltem Odabas pointed out that, while fatal drug overdose rates increased in every social setting – “urban, suburban, and rural” - in the USA from 2017 to 2020, Americans who thought drug addiction was an important issue in their community actually decreased over the same time period. She wrote: 

 “Nearly 92,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020, up from around 70,000 in 2017 … . During the same period, the rate of fatal overdoses rose from 21.7 to 28.3 per 100,000 people. / Despite these increases, the share of Americans who say drug addiction is a major problem in their local community declined by 7 percentage points … – from 42% in 2018 to 35% in 2021. And in a separate Center survey in early 2022, dealing with drug addiction ranked lowest out of 18 priorities for the president and Congress to address this year.” 

This is not a problem that will get better by ignoring it, and yet ignoring it seems like the course our society is choosing. We cannot refrain from harm, or cultivate good qualities like wisdom and kindness, if we aren’t willing to understand the conditions as they actually are. At a personal level, we can do our part by taking mindful consumption seriously, and paying attention to how our actions impact one another. How do we want to treat one another? How do we want to respond to the ups and downs of life? What good qualities do we want to make sure we are turning into habits? What harmful actions do we want to make sure we avoid? And how can we care for our hearts and minds in such a way that we have clarity and compassion, instead of confusion and contempt? 

       Training our hearts and minds in this way makes happiness possible, because we are cultivating understanding alongside kindness. When we understand how suffering arises, we can let go joyfully, because we don’t want to suffer or cause others to suffer. When we understand how wellbeing arises, we can practice joyfully, because we see how it brings about happiness for ourselves and happiness for others. And when we do so, we find that “contentment and gratitude” are not far away. In fact, I cannot conceive of a way that mindful consumption is even possible without contentment and gratitude. 

       I’ve mentioned the “Five Contemplations” as one practice to help us cultivate gratitude, but, like all habits, it is worth another look. It is offered as a way of mindfully pausing before eating a meal. If practiced regularly, it can also help us pay more attention to being grateful for more and more of the daily gifts that keep us alive: 

 “This food is the gift of the whole universe – the earth, the sky, and much hard work. May we eat in mindfulness so as to nourish our gratitude. May we transform our unskillful states of mind and learn to eat with moderation. May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness. We accept this food to realize the path of understanding, love, and joy.” (Adapted by the Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center)

        Again, we don’t recite these things in order to deny suffering or pretend that everything is all right. As Brother David Steindl-Rast has helpfully observed, “You can’t be grateful for war in a given situation, or violence, or sickness, things like that. So the key, when people ask, ‘Can you be grateful for everything?’ — no, not for everything, but in every moment.” Even in the midst of difficulties and injustice, I can find that, at the least, I can call to mind the people who have faced similar difficulties in the past, those who have been my teachers so that I could have resources and skills to respond today, and all those who are similarly deciding to think, speak, and act in ways that can bring about healing, justice, and happiness. I am not grateful for everything, but I can be grateful in every moment. 

       In reflecting on this second verse, I started with contentment and gratitude, rather than respect and humility, because I’ve found this is often a gentler approach. So many people have experienced respect and humility in humiliating, degrading ways. A Tumblr user named Stimmyabby put this in a particularly powerful way many years ago: 

 “Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like a person’ and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like an authority’

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say ‘if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you’ and they mean ‘if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person’

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.”

When we cultivate contentment and gratitude, respect and humility comes more naturally and easier, and is less prone to the misuse of meaning “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person.” When we understand how much our wellbeing depends on the wholesome decisions that we are all making together, we feel gratitude for our mutual care and cooperation, and we want to treat ourselves and one another with respect. The more we understand all the ways that suffering can arise, the more humble and grateful we feel when the conditions are right for wellbeing to arise. So, again, we are not coercing ourselves to show respect or feel humble. Instead, by practicing in a way that brings about understanding of suffering and wellbeing, respect and humility naturally arise, and they are part of our happiness. When they do, that is a sign that we are practicing skillfully, and another cause for gratitude.

        This respect, humility, gratitude, and contentment are also keys for being able to learn and grow. The last line of the verse, “the timely hearing of the Dharma,” refers specifically to hearing the Buddha’s teachings about how to practice in a way that helps us understand and come to an end to suffering. (You can reflect on it in a more broad way, if that is more appropriate for you.) But the idea that is prominent to me in this particular context is the timeliness of learning and growing in insight and compassion. We only have so much time, and the more I understand that, the more I want to spend my time in the most skillful, happy ways possible. There are many variables that are out of my control when it comes to learning like this, so it is important that I do my part to be ready to learn. I don’t want a timely opportunity to pass me by, because time is passing so very quickly. How can I learn to fashion happiness out of the days and years that I do have, and to do my part to make that happiness available to all beings? I want to be ready to learn, and ready to practice, when a timely teaching comes my way. I want to make the most of this brief life, this amazing opportunity, and I hope you do, too. 

The Linchpin of a Chariot: Caring for One Another

The Linchpin of a Chariot: Caring for One Another David Ketchum February 5, 2023 Watch the video HERE         There’s a story passed around about Karl Barth. I don’t know if it is a true story, but it’s the kind of story that tells the truth, whether it happened or not. The setup is simple: the community is asking pressing questions of the theologian. One concerned and earnest woman asks, “Is it true that we’ll see our loved ones again in heaven?” It feels clear that this question was about the existence and nature of the afterlife. So - “Is it true that we’ll see our loved ones again in heaven?” And the doctor replies, “Not only the loved ones.” 
People have argued about the afterlife for centuries, passionately and even violently, but Barth’s answer pointed to what is probably the more important question. Heaven is idealized as a place of perfection, where we experience joy at all times and with all people. But that is quite a different experience than what happens for a lot of us, a lot of the time. Barth is giving us a chance to think about what an unending life in community with others would really mean. 

Perhaps today’s version of Barth’s retort would be the popular tweet that simply states: “Sorry, conservative Christians, but spending eternity with you people isn't the selling point you think it is.” As things stand now, it’s likely that you would encounter at least someone that you would rather avoid, and that at least someone would rather avoid you. Perhaps we can put it stronger and say that it’s likely that every one of us would spoil heaven for at least one other person. 

“But,” I can hear some folks saying, “in heaven, we’ll all be changed! It will be easy to love each other there, because everything will be perfect!” And that is what always catches my attention; this aspiration is something we can work with, even in the here and now. The ability to imagine a world, even a heaven, where people can joyfully and peacefully live in community is one of the defining features that makes us human. Dr. Samuel Paul Veissière wrote that: 

 “Altruism, cooperation, and caring for the vulnerable is what made our species unique. It is empathy and cooperation, not self-interest and competition, that drove our physiological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, social, and technological evolution. We wouldn’t be the large-brained, neurally-plastic, intelligent, cumulatively-learning, empathetic beings that we are without the mutual help that characterizes our everyday interactions. Our evolutionary history is one of collective child-rearing, cooperative hunting and gathering, caring for elders and the sick, and freely sharing information.”

This is, as he described it, a “collective miracle” that came “before we domesticated plants and animals and settled in cities,” connecting us to each other across geography and history. This capacity is obviously not a guarantee. The injustice and suffering that has characterized the last several thousand years of human history and today’s headlines demonstrate that clearly enough. As Veissière pointed out, we have other capacities, too, that can lead us astray. For example,

“We behave according to the way we expects others to expect us to behave in any given context. This is a highly complex embodied cognitive operation that we engage in without conscious effort in all but the most trying of everyday actions, from knowing how and where to sit on a bus or waiting room to ignoring the homeless or experiencing xenophobic shivers. Bystander experiments in social psychology have shed ominous light on this angle on our social minds: as strange as it may seem, someone being harassed in public is more likely to be helped by a stranger if there are less people around; if the collective mode of attention is one of callousness and ignorance, breaking that spell becomes counter-intuitive and very difficult for all involved.”

So when this is the case, what can we do when our social norms have come to embody injustice, oppression, and violence? First, let’s remember that there is no virtue in staying in unhealthy, especially abusive, relationships and communities. And you cannot coerce yourself into having trust or gratitude. But we hold this caution alongside our capacity for cooperative, kind relationships. And we use the wisdom of both to learn how to establish wellbeing in ourselves and healthy relationships with others. This “both” aspect is very important. We aren’t pretending that there aren’t ways for this to go wrong, or that we can guarantee that we won’t hurt each other, intentionally or unintentionally. But by honestly looking at and learning from how community can become unhealthy, we can be intentional about cultivating the skills we need to make those wounds less likely, and to heal from them when they do occur. And we know it is worth our effort, because we also recognize that capacity within and between us for cooperative, kind relationships. And we understand how important and joyful it is to have those kinds of relationships. 

    One of my favorite reminders of how we can practice this comes from the Buddha. In a teaching called “The Bonds of Fellowship,” he described four “grounds” or habits that nurture healthy, mutually caring relationships: 

“Generosity, kind words, beneficial help,
& consistency in the face of events,
in line with what's appropriate
in each case, each case.
These bonds of fellowship [function] in the world
like the linchpin in a moving cart.”
(AN 4.32, tr. by Thanissaro Bhikkhu) 

The linchpin is what prevented a chariot wheel from sliding off the axle and causing the cart to crash. It’s a small part that plays a big role. It doesn’t matter how wonderful and fancy the chariot is, it will come apart without the linchpin. That is the role of our practice in maintaining healthy relationships, helping us relate to our suffering in a more skillful way and create conditions that support compassion and wisdom. 

        Generosity is something that is easy for us to take for granted, especially in an age where more and more of our interactions are reduced to transactions. We very easily lose touch of how we are part of the complex web of life, both wellbeing and suffering. Losing that awareness, it is easy to get lost and miss how generosity is a vital part of building relationships. Generosity is an opportunity for us to recognize our mutual dependence and intentionally connect this with our empathy and kindness. I often think about a short teaching the Buddha gave that, “even if a person throws the rinsings of a bowl or a cup into a village pool or pond, thinking, 'May whatever animals live here feed on this,' that would be a source of merit, to say nothing of what is given to human beings.” Recognizing and naming the value of our generosity and mutuality is also part of the practice. It connects us. We learn to listen to each other, understand what our needs are, find ways to meet those needs together, and celebrate. Generosity allows us to cultivate mutuality and solidarity, so that community can flourish. And we directly experience how our wellbeing is bound together. 

Reflecting on “Kind words” is a remembrance that communication is not neutral. As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, “Every time we communicate, we either produce more compassion, love, and harmony or we produce more suffering and violence. Our communication is what we put out into the world and what remains after we have left it.” (The Art of Communicating) Every time we speak is an opportunity to express care or contempt, and to build cultures and communities of care or contempt. When we carry with us a deep remembrance that “words can create happiness or suffering,” we can increasingly use our words as a gift. By paying attention to how our words impact one another, we become more skillful in choosing what to say and when to say it in a way that helps, instead of hurts. 

        Practicing “beneficial help” is an invitation to not just give a helping hand, but also to encourage each other in developing virtue, kindness, and wisdom. We take the time to learn how to 1) refrain from hurting one another and 2) actively support one another’s wellbeing. This is another example of how our wellbeing is bound up together. Restraining from harming and supporting wellbeing are vital skills, and they depend on our ability to pay attention and practice discernment. Discernment depends on the relationship we have with our experiences, ourselves, each other, and impacts. When I teach meditation, one of the most common questions I hear is, "am I doing this right?" This is fine, except that it often is connected to a very antagonistic relationship with our experience. We get stuck in a loop of approval and disapproval, praise and blame, without ever giving ourselves the opportunity to understand our needs and our experiences. This is not beneficial help. 

        So I try to help people shift more into the question, "what happens when I do it this way?" Pay attention; does this lead to well-being in myself, others, and the world? Or to suffering? Start training the heart-mind in these small, more neutral moments. Learn how wisdom and compassion can arise naturally with discernment. Restraint is not difficult when it arises out of discernment and a commitment to non-harming. And acting with the confidence born of discernment empowers us to more fully be present with and enjoy what we choose to do. We also know that, if a hurt does arise, we have the tools we need to notice and address it, and to do so before it grows so large as to become intractable. This allows us to be more relaxed and present with ourselves and each other. 

In another teaching, the way we treat one another is also connected to gratitude. Put simply, “A person of integrity is grateful & thankful.” This is a wonderful insight: we can’t separate gratitude from ethics. If we are really paying attention, we begin to understand how much our ability to live ethically is connected to the decisions that others make. If a feeling of self-righteousness is developing in us, that we are somehow separate from or better than others, that’s a sign that we need to pause. There is ultimately no way for me to cultivate my wellbeing at the expense of your wellbeing, and there is no way for you to cultivate your wellbeing at the expense of my wellbeing. Our wellbeing depends on one another. If we cultivate awareness of this, then when the conditions are supportive for virtue, generosity, compassion, and wisdom, we will naturally feel gratitude. We just need to learn to pay attention. 

        And we do all this consistently, over time. This isn’t haphazard; it is a habit. And it is the consistency that allows it to become something real. In each situation we find ourselves in, we discern the most skillful way to respond, “in line with what’s appropriate in each case”. In time, these choices become cultures and processes that support wellbeing. 

Saying all this, we realize that community is a practice and, again, there are no guarantees. We know what it feels like to be crushed by injustice, wounded by conflict, traumatized by violence and abuse.  Sometimes, there is no linchpin and the only path for us is to go our separate ways, to break a cycle of harm, hopefully before the wheel flies off the axle. There is pain in that, but also peace and even some happiness. This is a very hopeful and practical approach, even when our family relationships are not ideal, and even when our parents, partners, or children are strained or even broken. We are helping create conditions where the possibility of healthy, wise relationships is something real, and that is a great gift and a cause for happiness. Our growing wellbeing becomes an invitation and an example that invites others to cultivate wellbeing – because, again, our wellbeing is bound up together. 

        This is something we can do. It is part of our deep history, the gift of unfathomable millennia of evolution: “collective child-rearing, cooperative hunting and gathering, caring for elders and the sick, and freely sharing information.” We can be intentional about consistently practicing generosity, kind words, and beneficial help. We can reconnect with these evolutionary roots, both honoring all that is good and healing all the harm that we inherited from our ancestors. We might not ever make this a heaven on earth, but we can surely make it a lot less like hell.