There's been something rolling around in this very active brain of mine for some time, and this cold, windy day seems to be a good day to try to express it.
OK, so I listen to the public radio news headlines just about every morning. I need to have some sense of what the world is dealing with, not unlike how, back in the day, I was expected to read the daily New York Times cover-to-cover before answering TIME Magazine's Letters to the Editor. It was the pre-internet era, and because the magazine came out only once a week, the newspaper was the best way for a Letters Correspondent to get caught up with world events in between issues.
Despite the fact of having been lectured to all my life about certain things being the "human condition", it has always been hard for me to personally understand or feel personal responsibility for most of the crises that are reported on in the news. In the case of the recent earthquake, as the numbers of deaths soar, it is becoming clear that political and geopolitical issues are almost as shaky as the movement of the earth itself. Mass shootings, war, people fleeing from terrorism, violence, and hatred. The release of toxic substances into the air and water. Corruption. Despotism. Theft. Drug and alcohol addiction.
I mean, there is literally almost none of this that is "in me". I'm sure I am the brunt of jokes, because for decades I barely had the instinct to benefit myself by making enough money to live on. I now understand that it was in large part because the greater system is based on something that is also not in me -- the desire for "profit". It's hard for me to imagine committing most of the sins on the church's list. (The one sticky exception to this is that I suppose you could say that I have "coveted" -- a life of doing what I love in the place I love. I have "coveted", or dearly desired, self-actualization. This isn't quite the same as coveting my neighbor's TV or SUV, but coming to peace with how it all turned out may be my biggest spiritual challenge.) It makes me laugh sometimes that my generation of women fought so hard to be included in institutions like the church, and yet perhaps such institutions literally were geared specifically to addressing the lives of men. It is bittersweet to think of many generations of women, deprived of societal power, kneeling submissively, heads bowed and covered, shame-filled, whose actual sins were barely a blip on the radar! Also bittersweet to remember that some of man's most inspired and beautiful artistic and musical creations were on behalf of the church...these threads are completely intertwined, aren't they?
We women of a certain generation have "fought" all our lives, to be heard, to be able to do certain activities or careers, to balance families and jobs, to stay healthy. And yet none of us can possibly expect to successfully fight (to the bitter end) all the violence and hatred that is being unleashed now. Fighting just isn't "in" many of us. Conflict isn't our natural state, and we don't do it particularly well. Pushback is too painful, and too hopeless. Perhaps this means that the whole dualistic conflict-driven paradigm is starting to break down. The blessing of being an older woman is that, speaking only for myself, the only thing I have in me is to be myself. I can only "be" what is authentically in me. I don't really believe in commanding anyone or anything, but in this context, there is only one commandment: "Be Thyself."
