Getting off the Hamster Wheel

Last week, one of the Daily Meditations from Richard Rohr really resonated with me:

We are not hamsters on a wheel, waiting to fall into the cedar shavings at the bottom of the cage. We are seekers of light and life, bearers of shadows and burdens. We are struggling to journey together toward moral fulfillment. We are learning to embrace the unfathomable darkness where God dwells with enthusiasm that equals our love of light. 

Actually, it was the first sentence in that paragraph that particularly resonated with me, “We are not hamsters on a wheel, waiting to fall into the cedar shavings at the bottom of the cage.”  Unfortunately, we are to a greater or lesser extent, just that.  We often go through life without reflection or contemplation and without even recognizing that we are on a hamster wheel.  We accept where we are in life without much consideration or question of where we are or where we are going; are we seekers of light and life as Richard Rohr proposes or do we just try to make it through the day to day routine and challenges that often fills our days?

Speaking from experience, it is very easy to get into a routine and follow that routine without necessarily questioning if that is what I could or should be doing.  Routines are good in that they allow you to get through you days and weeks and more without having to expend energy to think or reflect on what you are doing.  The Corona Pandemic, to a great extent, forced us get off our regular hamster wheels and decide how we were going to approach life in the corona pandemic world.  In many cases this amounted to finding a new wheel to mount and begin to ride again.  In other case, unfortunately, it meant life-changing decisions that had to be made – sometimes with tragic consequences. 

I do believe that assertion by Richard Rohr; we are created to be seekers of light and life, bearers of shadows and burdens.  We can only do that by trying, as best we can, to live a life that is conscious of who we are and why we do the things we do and being the people God created us to be.  This is what makes us human.  We are called to reflect on what we are doing and why we are doing it.  That is no easy task and can require that we get off the hamster wheel or at least stop the spinning from time to time and step outside our routine existence. 

This is what Jesus’s parables attempt to do.  The reality of God’s world is opened up in new ways.  The hamster wheels of the people he was talking to was brought into focus and questioned.  Is that the way I should be treating others; who is my neighbour; do I walk by the person who has been mugged and is lying at the side of the road even if he or she is not worthy of my attention, what is truly important in my life?

How do we see “the other” as a fellow human being and act and react as a human being?  I want to close by applying this to an issue that is currently trending on social media – the Black lives Matter movement that has been reinvigorated during the corona pandemic.   The response by some is that all lives matter and of course as Christians we all called to believe that all lives matter.  But what does it mean to stop the wheel spinning in this issue?  For me, the cry of Black lives Matter has never been a statement that only black lives matter or that other lives don’t matter.  It is a cry that black lives and lives of indigenous people - indeed lives of those who are “the other” also matter.  However, in many ways and in many situations that they have meant less than lives of white people or perhaps people of wealth and influence.

Let us be seekers of light and life and bearers of shadows and burdens on our journey.  

Blessings to you on that journey.

Who’s in and Who’s Out

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

King Lear Act 5 Scene 3: Lear to Cordelia

Who’s in and who’s out—that is the question (with apologies to Prince Hamlet).   That question has been resonating with me recently.   I have had three encounters with that question in the past couple of weeks.  The first, and most timely for today, was in an interview with American theologian and Episcopalian Diana Butler Bass on the CBC program Tapestry.  The subject of the talk was Religion and Spirituality.  Bass noted that she first truly realized why people were turning their backs on organized religion was on the tenth anniversary of 9-11 which fell on a Sunday.  She was hesitant to attend church as she was fearful it might turn into a celebration of nationalistic triumphalism.  She was assured by the priest that the service would have very quiet, reflective liturgy.  She decided to attend and was reassured when the liturgy was all the priest had promised and quite appropriate to the solemn occasion.  The preacher, who was not clergy, but rather someone, who had been working at the White House that day spoke in his sermon of the four thousand people who had lost their lives in the decade following that event.  She was at first incredulous and thought, it is fifty thousand; it is a hundred thousand!  Then she realized he was referring to the American lives lost in Iraq.  (Note: a Google search puts the actual count has the loss of life at of up to 190,000 people including 134,000 civilians).  Bass walked out of that service and when her husband texted her and asked if she was coming back to church, she replied, “I don’t know.”

Another example of who’s in and who’s out was in an article in the Globe and Mail on September 2^nd which was entitled, Hell and High Water.  It was addressing the seeming resistance to actually preparing for the ever increasing ‘floods of the century’ which are occurring with increasing frequency.  The article noted the example of the Mississippi River’s Great Flood of 1927.  The article noted the official death toll was 246.  However, that was only the people that officially mattered.  It didn’t include the lives of African Americans—Negros as they would have been classified—which brought the death toll to over one thousand.  Who’s in and who’d out; who’s counted and who doesn’t; who’s lives matter and who’s lives don’t.

The last example was inspired when I read the article and I recalled the passage in the Gospel of Matthew regarding the feeding of the five thousand by Jesus, “And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children”.   Oh by the way there were women and children but we don’t need to mention how many.  That is a recurring situation in the bible where women are often not named e.g. the Syrophoenician woman or the woman at the well.  People in the bible are often not named in the bible even when they are central the story.  This is true for men as well as women e.g. the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal son.  However, perhaps we should be thankful for all the people who are named and bring life to the stories.

However, the question I place before you today is, when does a person count and when do they fade into the background of the story of our lives?  We have made progress in recent years to address this question.  The response of Black Lives Matter is addressing the frequent impunity with which the police treat people of colour non-people who don’t count.  This is not restricted to the United States. In Canada deaths by police action is much rarer, thank God.   However, we still have police insisting that ‘carding’ is necessary for them to do their job.  People carded just happen to be mostly non-whites.  In Canada we have the hopeful move of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which reviewed the institutionalize mistreatment of aboriginal Canadians.  The institutions of the people who were ‘in’ treated aboriginal people as objects rather than as people.

Of course it is easy to sit back and point fingers and judge events and attitudes of actions of the past by today’s standards and values.  How do we examine culture, our governments, and our institutions including the churches, and above all ourselves, in how we view others?  Who do we hold as being in and who is out. Who counts and who doesn’t?   Some years ago I attended a conference on a group of mostly white men who were trying to deal with white middle class male privilege in ourselves and in our society.  Unfortunately the group tended to look mostly at society and not at ourselves.  The conference was attended by two Inuit men from northern Canada.  One of them noted that in their culture they believed that, “no one was bigger than anyone else.”   At resonated with me then and it still does. 

How do we treat no one as bigger than anyone else; everyone as the same importance as everyone else?  As a Christian, how do I treat each person as a child of God?  How do I relate to each person as someone who is “in” and not as someone who is “out”?  If I do not I truly am in the prison that Lear and Cordelia are going to—however they are aware of their prison walls unlike the rest of us.   I know I am going to fail; in a state if sin; I am going to miss the mark.  Fortunately I am offered forgiveness and can start again.  That is the mystery of things indeed. 

Thank be to God.