Parenthood, flexibility, fear, and politics

I took a personal day from work today, wanting to rest, work around the house, and write. I've started the dishes, cuddled with the dog, read some blogs, and had some oatmeal and tea. A bit of writing, and then I'm upstairs to finish unpacking the bathroom. I want to spend as much time as I can preparing the house--I work slowly and deliberately--but it's felt difficult to do while working full time, caring for the dog, running necessary errands, getting enough rest.... I'm a Pisces. We're easily overwhelmed. Lately I've been thinking about this quality a lot and trying to find some value in it, rather than just hating it and wishing it weren't true. If I know that I get overwhelmed easily, and I'm practicing acceptance, what is the healthiest way to proceed, and what gifts can I discover?

Last night Adonis and I attended our first Birthing from Within childbirth class. I've felt so much serendipity around our pregnancy so far, and very little anxiety or fear. (I just want the house to be ready!) All indicators are that I'm healthy, the fetus is healthy, and things are proceeding normally; we've opted for very little testing or intervention of any kind, preferring to embrace the inevitable mystery of the process, and that feels like the right choice. We feel utterly blessed to be working with our calm, hugely competent, compassionate midwife and her apprentice, a Witch with something of an attitude. The childbirth class is just us and one other couple; the other pregnant woman shares a first name with me, is due a week before I am, and lives with her partner two blocks from us. Like us, they're first-time "older" parents. The teacher is certainly Pagan-ish if not Pagan. Both Adonis and I were relieved after the first class to have an intentional space for focusing on the birth. Sometimes little bits of doubt creep into my brain--maybe we should be doing things some other way, having sonograms, planning a hospital birth--but then I'll have an experience, like attending last night's class, that confirms for me the way we've chosen to do things.

My family has been relatively chill, for them, but it's clear that they're taking on the worry-work that is eluding me. That bugs me. I'm sure it's a good lesson for parenthood to be dealing now with disagreement, conflict, and their fear about my choices; there's going to be plenty about the way Adonis and I parent that my own parents won't like. But the shock for me has been how my parents apparently don't care what my reasons are. They don't want to be reassured. They don't want explanations. They don't want to--or can't--hear why I value what I value. They just want to express their own fears and opinions and then hope I change my mind. There's no dialogue, no conversation. I think of the premium I place on gathering information, thinking things through, listening to my intuition, consulting my values, consulting my partner...and I marvel that these people, my people, don't use the same methods or value the same things. Didn't they encourage me to think critically? Didn't they teach me to consult my own heart and conscience? I thought they did. Maybe I was wrong. It's unsettling and weird to realize--at my quite advanced age, I know--that in an important sense, they don't care what I think. They don't want to understand what I'm doing or why.

All of this led Adonis to make an observation with which I quickly and easily agreed, once it had been articulated: when we're parents, we want to engage our kid(s) in conversations about what they believe and value, and to listen and sincerely try to understand, even if we disagree. I feel as if my parents maybe tried to do this when I was growing up, but I haven't felt that openness from them in a long time.

Something that's very true for me, though clearly not for everyone, and probably doesn't have to be true for everyone: to love me means that you care enough to hear what I believe and why I believe it.

Is that quite right? Of course my parents love me; of course they care for me. Yet still I feel this lack--a fundamental way of being cared for that I get from my partner and many of my friends and teachers, but not from my family of origin. That care expresses itself in wanting to hear what I have to say, wanting to know what I believe, and valuing the fact that I value something. It's a way of taking me seriously. It is, I believe, what Iris Murdoch means when she talks about "loving attention." It requires curiosity and flexibility on the part of the parent, the lover, the one who cares, and it requires a temporary suspension of fear and ego.

Now all of a sudden I feel like I'm talking about reasons to support Obama over McCain this election. And I am. McCain is the inflexible, calcified, ego- and fear-driven, dismissive patriarch writ large. So is Sarah Palin, for that matter: age and sex don't define these things. While McCain and Palin are both so readily dismissive of women's health and other items on the "liberal feminist agenda" (not that he has a damn clue what that means; I was still shocked to hear him state the matter so baldly), Obama and Biden appear utterly believably as good dads--literally, not in an archetypal sense, though that, too, must matter. Obama is able to convey his flexibility, curiosity, and devotion to the best in people while running the most impressively tight and creative campaign for president I have ever seen. One of McCain's slogans may be "country first," but it's pretty clear he's really about himself first, foremost, perhaps only. Obama, on the other hand, really appears fearless, and he appears largely to set his ego aside in pursuit of a larger, shared good.

Links on the UU church shooting

Shakesville has a moving first-person account of the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church last Sunday morning. Melissa McEwan has (as always) excellent commentary on the shooting as a domestic terrorist attack, and violent, eliminationist rhetoric in the mainstream conservative movement. The gunman, whose stated motive was hatred of liberals and gays, had also years previously threatened the life of his ex-wife, a member of the church.

(You can go here to send messages of love and support to the church.)

Make love, not war

It sounds like it's from the Onion, but it's not:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

Absurd, but kind of sweet, too.

Ethics, science, and the Goddess

I've tried a few times to write a post about this story, broadcast on the CBS news segment "freeSpeech" the evening of the Amish school shootings a couple of weeks ago. Brian Rohrbough is the father of a boy killed at Columbine; he offers his opinion that school shootings are a result of teaching evolution.

I've tried the snark angle ("science teachers everywhere rub their hands with evil glee"), but it was too easy and unsatisfying. I've tried rebuttal ("evolution doesn't entail that the strong kill the weak; that's a gross oversimplification of the principle of survival of the fittest; fitness is measured by a species's ability to adapt to a changing environment..."). I'm sick of being angry, sick of my own zeal in trying to change the world through force of reason.

Christianity doesn't entail dogmatism, biblical literalism, or other forms of irrationality. But the public face of Christianity in this country too often looks like illogical extremism. Sometime I feel like returning to the mainstream Protestantism of my upbringing just to fight the public face of Christianity in this country. But that's not where my spiritual home is.

Instead of any more snark, anger, or derision - all of which I enjoy perhaps more than I should - let me offer a Pagan counterpoint to Mr. Rohrbough's free speech.

There is no simple answer to the question, why did the Amish school shootings happen? Part of the answer is sexism and misogyny, since the victims were all girls. Part of the answer is the legal and easy availability of guns in the U.S. There are many other reasons, to be sure, some cultural, some more specific to the perpetrator.

How can anyone study evolution and not wonder at the marvels of the universe? Of course, belief in a creator God isn't incompatible with belief in evolution. Indeed, to strip the creator God of the intricacy and wonder of evolution and hand him a magic wand and a seven-day deadline seems to me to insult and diminish that God. Pagans don't believe in a creator God, however. We see the Goddess, dual deity, or multiple deities in nature itself. Science is one way to know the Goddess. The miracle needn't be conjured from some transcendent realm. It's right in front of your eyes.

The "inherent value of life" can be found in nature and in ourselves. There is an emergent morality here. It's not the morality of a stern paternalistic God, the God who says it is right and just for Abraham to kill his son if that is what God demands. (Mr. Rohrbough says that the murder of innocent children is always wrong, but his own religion offers a caveat; when God tells you to murder an innocent child, it's morally advisable to do so!) Pagan morality is grounded in respect, love, and passion for the earth and her creatures. Pagan morality is grounded in reverence for all bodies, including the human body. Responsibility for our actions, for their effects on others and the environment, is central to a Pagan ethics. Acting responsibly can in some cases include aborting pregnancies. We might think that the value of children is increased, not decreased, when they are chosen and wanted, when their mothers actively take responsibility for bringing them into this world. Indeed, around the world there is an inverse relationship between the amount of social support given to children and the restrictiveness of abortion laws. In other words, those countries with the most liberal reproductive freedoms provide the greatest social safety net for their children. Doesn't that say something about the value a society places on children?

The absence of God the patriarch doesn't preclude morality, althought it does preclude morality of a certain kind. And good riddance, say I!

Autumn, pentacles

Welcome to my favorite month of the year! Lugh and I took a long hike in the woods this morning - me in a t-shirt and a wool scarf - and gloried in the crisp air and turning leaves. (Okay, he mostly chased squirrels. Sometimes I sing Goddess chants while I hike so he can find me again after he's run off after some squirrel.) In addition to the busy squirrels collecting acorns and chattering in the tree tops, ducks splashed loudly in the water like children playing. A black and white woodpecker wasn't bothered by my singing, but a blue heron rose up over the water as if I'd disturbed him.

Like most of you in the U.S., I suspect, I've been following the campaign to have the pentacle added to the list of approved religious symbols for military headstones. The issues was brought home to me in a visceral way by this artist's rendering of what the headstone would look like (from Chas Clifton).

Such a simple thing, a symbol, but so potent. I adore the pentacle, but I don't feel comfortable wearing it most places. What does the pentacle symbolize? The stars and the dome of heaven. The element of earth. The human body. Five sacred elements: earth, air, fire, water, spirit. The human being cloaked in divinity. Protection. Mystery. The shining side and the shadow. The womb. An apple - forbidden fruit, forbidden knowledge. Wisdom. The triple Goddess and two aspects of the God. Birth, initiation (maiden), flowering (mother), waning (crone), and death. Love, wisdom, knowledge, law, and power (the "pearl pentacle"). Sex, self, passion, pride, and power (the "iron pentacle"). Interrelationship and interconnectedness. The power to banish and invoke. The five senses. The five-fold kiss. Sacred, holy, necessary.

Permit me my death

Pagans have various views on death, but I think many agree that it's a great mystery and a natural part of life. Many pagans see death as a transition rather than an ending. While it's natural for our animal selves to fear death, and while it's important for us to mourn and remember our dead, death isn't something we need to fear for ourselves. We have been given the gifts of embodiment and consciousness for a span of years and, in the words of an older man at the mystery school I attend, "death is what's next."

What's next for Terry Schiavo? Her consciousness is long dead, and the brain and body continue to deteriorate, although the body is still alive in a minimal sense (the heart beats and nutrition sustains this). Since I believe death is an important transition, an exchange of energy, and a journey back to the Mother, I think it's possible that Terry Schiavo - whoever she was or will be - is being grievously harmed. She's not alive on the earth in any meaningful sense, but neither has she been set free. It's as if she's suspended between life and death - as if fortune's wheel has gotten stuck.

If the materialists are right, and I'm sympathetic to the view, then Terry Schiavo is simply dead. She cannot be harmed anymore by opportunistic bastard Republicans. If the Christians are right, then what is the state of Schiavo's soul: has it passed on to heaven, or is it still stuck in her body? And if it's passed on, what's the point of keeping her body alive?

But if it's true, instead, that death is a transition we need to honor along its way, and that the death of consciousness and the body may provide a gateway to something new - whatever's "next" - then it's breathtakingly cruel to bar that door. For myself, I want to die with enthusiasm and grace. Not anytime soon, mind you, but when it's time. I want to go singing into the next world. When I die, permit me my death.