Excellence

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
--Theodore “Ted” Logan

I’ve recently learned that Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are planning a third installment in their film series that started with the famous (or infamous) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The news brought a grin to my face and a whimsical impulse to visit the virtue of Excellence, as defined by that wonderful example of goofball 80s SciFi comedy movies.

Normally the word “excellence” brings to mind driving ambition and images of necks bestrewn with gold-medals. We think of Excellence as being a quality of perfect performance, often attained with great effort.

What I love about Bill and Ted is that they turn that notion of Excellence all around. Rather than Excellence implying a race in which combatants ambitiously elbow out their inferiors for recognition, Bill and Ted define Excellence as a way of behaving towards others with Kindness, as in, “Be excellent to each other!” (They follow this with a reminder to find Joy in life’s day-to-day: “Party on, dudes!”)

I have to admit, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is not my usual cup of tea. (My friends know that in fact I strongly prefer films with two of any of the following: Cute Boys, Giant Bugs, and Explosions. Men in Black, The Fifth Element, and Starship Troopers are the rare examples that can claim all three. Despite the rest of the world’s opinion to the contrary, I do NOT consider Keanu Reeves as meeting the “cute boy” requirement, even back then. He just doesn’t float my boat. But, I digress... ) Still, the film grows on you. Bill and Ted perfectly capitulate the Tarot archetype of the Fool, and their adventure the Fool’s Journey. There’s something so guileless about them that you can’t help but like them and root for them.

The Excellence that that Bill and Ted preach--mostly by example, at least until they apparently become the founders of an advanced society of the 27th Century--is an aggregate virtue (much like Honor, which we saw contains ingredients like Discipline, Courage, and Fidelity.) I think Excellence as Bill and Ted define it would include bits of Kindness, Joy, Simplicity, and Innocence.

As such, Excellence reminds me of the Buddhist virtue Maitri. Often translated as “loving-kindness,” Pema Chodron explains that Maitri might be better translated as “unconditional friendliness.” Bill and Ted indeed seem to espouse a simple Friendliness to the various characters they encounter in space and time. And that’s excellent!

So today, tap into your inner Ted or channel your higher Bill, and bring that Joyful Friendliness of Excellence to the people around you. How do your words and deeds tell people to be excellent to each other, and to party on?

May we see the gates of Excellence, and perhaps make a home there.

Oh, and: San Dimas High School Football RULES!

Activation

No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist... Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we're part of...
--Starhawk, Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

Today, 10/10/10, the group 350.org sponsors a day of worldwide grassroots activism to bring awareness and action on climate change. As such, I felt the virtue of Activation would make an appropriate stop on our journey.

How might we define the virtue of Activation? When I first started to think about it, my mind turned to chemistry. In chemistry, molecules have to attain a certain level of energy in order to react and attain a transition state, whether that’s water and iron reacting to make rust, or soda and water reacting to make CO2. Given the goals of Bill McKibben’s 350.org, the chemistry definition seems an apt metaphor. After all, 350.org is trying to get citizens “fired up” to interact and attain a sort of “transition state” for our society.

In more formal virtues literature, however, we can also find discussion of Activation, in the form of “Active Citizenship,” which psychologists Seligman and Peterson describe as a manifestation of the root virtue of Justice. Just what experts mean by “Active Citizenship” is unclear, because it implies that citizens (of a nation, or the world) have certain responsibilities. While constitutions often spell out our rights as citizens, they rarely lay out our duties.

Still, in America (and all successful democracies), the health of society probably lies in how well its citizens carry out these poorly-defined responsibilities of citizenship, through voluntary efforts. One of the earliest observers of U.S. culture, Alexis de Toqueville, noted that the success of our nation’s infant democracy lay in the efforts of our many voluntary organizations. Americans did not wait for government to solve their problems. Instead, they reached out to their neighbors, whether through their churches, fraternal groups, or bowling leagues. (Well, I don’t think they had bowling leagues when de Toqueville visited, since the rules of bowling only got laid out in New York 60 years after his book was published. This was my half-joking allusion to Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, which talks about the decline of such civic organizations in the U.S.)

De Toqueville also pointed out the juicy paradox that Americans, who so cherish virtues like Independence and Liberty, would often harness themselves together to solve problems communally.

I think the goals of 350.org have obvious merit, a “books for nuns”¹ proposition if I ever heard it, and I urge any of you who haven’t signed the “Put Solar on It” petition to at least do that today. But I also admit that in the face of such overwhelming challenges like climate change, the actions of one little person can feel like a drop in the slowly-rising ocean. (I myself remember a pang of such despair after a long community activist meeting in the Castro three years ago, addressing the MRSA outbreak amongst gay men there.)

McKibben has faced criticism from his fellow activist Joe Romm, who feels that at the end of the day, it is the action of elected leaders in government that will actually realize the necessary changes.

Romm feels that, more than rallies and grassroots symbolic gestures, what we need are laws and government action compelled in the voting booth. Thus, he says a better use of people’s Activation lies in defeating California’s Prop 23, an oil company-sponsored bill that would undo some of Gov. Schwarzenneger’s progressive energy policies recently passed into law.

So, for those of you in California, make sure to vote next month, and get the word out to other voters to oppose Prop 23. If you want to get really ambitious, go door to door in the neighborhood, or mention Prop 23 at a meeting of any of your voluntary associations, be they religious, sororal, fraternal, or bowling. (Or any combination thereof.)  

It takes more than one drop of water to rust a nail. It takes more than one grain of baking powder to make a cake rise.

Starhawk has said that magic consists of the act of changing consciousness at will. For some people, that magic manifests in activism. That magic is Activation.

May we see the gates of Activation, and perhaps make a home there.


¹“Books for nuns”: In my personal lexicon, a cause that is so obviously good and innocuous that no one could oppose it. Who could oppose a charitable donation of books to an order of religious ladies? Only a fiend.

Aymah

Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.
--Psalm 55:5

Today is the twelfth anniversary of the fatal attack on Matthew Shepard, whose murder inspired a public outcry against prejudice, hatred, and homophobia. On such a somber occasion, it felt right to me to recall the Jewish middah (virtue) of Aymah (Horror).

Aymah may seem to be a curious choice for a virtue; we’re so accustomed to Courage, found as a virtue in literally dozens of cultures, that to acknowledge its converse seems bizarre. How can fearfulness be a beneficial trait worth emulating? 

The sense of Aymah has more to do with the dread we feel when recognizing the suffering and injustice in the world. As Rabbi Jonathan Blake, Renée Holtz, and Birgit R. Sacher explain on the URJ website:

The virtue in aymah is not in our ability to incite fear or horror, but rather in our capacity to be horrified by conditions or circumstances in the world. Judaism demands that we respond to evil and injustice. Our system of mitzvoth, or commandments, teach us how to react. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "We are taught to be mitzvah-conscious in regard to the present moment, to be mindful of the constant opportunity to do the good thing." (God In Search of Man p. 363)

Thus, Aymah describes the horror we feel when we stare into the abyss of human ignorance and hate, and the associated urge to do something about it. I think that applies to all human beings, whether we practice in the Jewish faith or not. ;-)

The morning I heard about Matthew Shepard’s death, I was getting ready for a day of lectures during my second year of medical school, and Aymah well describes how I felt when I heard the story. (It is said that the bicyclist who discovered Matt Shepard was so confused by the battered state of the body he initially thought it was a scarecrow, not a living human being--an apt metaphor for inducing a sense of dread.) This was October 11, 1998, a few days after the attack, and also (by chance) National Coming Out Day. So I stopped by the Castro to buy a bucket of pink carnations, and passed them out to fellow med students to wear in recognition that all people, gay or straight, must combat homophobia. At the time I had no idea Matthew Shepard's story would become a cause célèbre.

Matthew Shepard’s death inspired a wave of anti-hate activism, best exemplified by his wonderful mother, Judy Shepard. Thanks to her work and that of others, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law not quite a year ago. It amazes me that it took that long; Judy Shepard actually had to hear one Republican representative describe her son’s death as a hoax. (I shudder with Aymah.)

Another reaction to the murder was The Laramie Project, a play and later a film containing interviews with people from the town of Laramie, Wyoming, where Matthew was killed. In the following excerpt, Matthew’s father describes how he reacted to his son’s death. Knowing the hardships in Matthew’s all-too-brief life, it made me cry. It’s 3 minutes and worth a view:

Even in the 21st century, gay youth remain targets of harassment. All of us recall last month's suicide of 19-year-old Tyler Clementi after his college roommate violated his privacy by posting video images of him having sex with another man on Facebook. The story has brought forth messages of support and not a few of Aymah. Efforts to reach out to gay youth, such as columnist Dan Savage's project It Gets Better, have received deserved attention. 

Today, let us recall our own moments of Aymah, whether from hearing news stories like the deaths of Matthew Shepard or Tyler Clementi, watching the despoiling of the Gulf by an oil spill, or witnessing the pain and suffering of our fellow living beings. Bring to mind how our capacity to feel Aymah, fear, can temper us, like a steel blade, to become a  Divine tool of action and response.

May we see the gates of Aymah, and perhaps make a home there.

Openness

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
--Pema Chödrön    

Today is October 5th, and that, my friends, is one of the three days in the Roman Calendar marking the ritual of the Mundus Patet--the “opening of the world.” (The other two days are August 24--the birthday of both this blog and yours truly--and November 8.) Each year on these holidays, at the Palatine Hill at the center of the city of Rome, priests moved a large stone called the lapis manalis off a sacred chamber (shown above) believed to be the entrance to the Underworld, unleashing the spirits of the dead. This seemed an appropriate occasion to offer a contemplation on the virtue of Openness.

As with Kiku no Sekku, the Japanese holiday that we visited back on September 9, the Mundus Patet also relates to the harvest season. The Romans’ forebears, the Etruscans, would store fruits of the harvest, as well as seed-grain, in a pit dug in the earth and covered with a stone. Classicist Warde Fowler believed that the opening of the chamber correlated with important harvest festivals during which grain was stored or seed-grain taken out for the sowing of winter wheat.

As the more urban culture of the Romans displaced the Etruscans, the agricultural association of the ritual waned. Since the Goddess Ceres presided over both agriculture as well as the Underworld, the ritual came to represent not the storage and release of grain, but of ghosts. On the days of Mundus Patet, Romans conducted no public business, fought no battles, sailed no ships, and performed no wedding ceremonies. Rather than celebrating the joy and feasting of the harvest, and the hopes of future plantings, the citizens walked the streets with dread,  wearing herbal charms for protection from the dead.

Thinking about the Mundus Patet reminded me of the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, who describes the entire goal of spiritual practice as maintaining a state of Openness, open heart and open mind. In an interview with poet bell hooks about prejudice and the meditation practice of tonglen, for example, she says:

It's a difficult and challenging practice to keep your heart and mind open.... But when you see, bell, how you feel towards [some] people, you can begin to understand why there is racism, why there is cruelty, because everyone has those same thoughts and emotions that you do... Openness actually starts to emerge when you see how you close down. You see how you close down, how you yell at someone, and you begin to have some compassion. It starts with compassion towards yourself and then you begin to extend that warmth to the rest of humanity. It begins to dawn on you how it could happen that people are yelling at others because they're oriental or black or hispanic or women or gay or whatever. You begin to know what it's like to stand in their shoes.

Later in the same interview, Pema describes Openness as being in touch with the Infinite Divine: “On one level, our suffering is caused by bigotry and dogmatism and all these things, but ultimately we suffer because we don't understand how limitless we are.” (This reminds me of Thorn Coyle’s teachings on connecting with the Divine, as exemplified by the title of her second work, Kissing the Limitless.)

A Buddhist parable that for me further resonates with the Mundus Patet involves Milarepa, the Tibetan Buddhist saint. Once upon a time, Milarepa retreated to meditate in a dark cave carved into the hillside of the Red Rock Jewel Valley (rather like the pit in the Palatine Hill). One day he returned to the cave only to find five fearsome demons there. After hours of torture grappling with them, Milarepa finally announced, “Ye ghosts and demons, enemies of the Dharma, I welcome you today! It is my pleasure to receive you!...We will discourse and play together.” In a commentary by Judith Simmer-Brown, she notes that Milarepa acknowledged

that the demons, and all phenomena for that matter, were of his own mind, which is of the nature of luminosity and emptiness. The demons were his own projections, and seeing them naively as external demons served as an obstacle to his practice. At the same time, their malicious nature was actually radiant and transparent, no different from awakening itself. If he could respond to them appropriately, he could reap great spiritual benefit.

Milarepa realized that the chamber did not hold ghosts or demons, but rather the seeds of his own Enlightenment. He went on to unleash his own Buddha nature.  

Learning meditation practices like tonglen gives us a metaphoric form of the Mundus Patet. When we allow ourselves to face the spectres of our own nature that frighten us so badly, that is Openness. Opening the gate does not release the demons; rather, it is by facing our dark shadows that we Open the Mundus, the “world” of ourselves. Once we crack ourselves Open, we find within the pit not the menacing shades of our Underworld, but rather the seed-grains of our own potential, our Limitless nature.

So, today, on a ritual of Opening the World, consider how facing your own frightening internal specters may offer you a chance to harvest great spritual fruits. As we shove aside the rock of our own small and frightened natures, we attain our state of Openness.

May we see the gates of Openness, and perhaps make a home there.

Geuzennaam

Sticks and stones/ May break my bones,/ But names will never hurt me. 
--19th century English nursery rhyme

October 3rd marks a famous event in the Dutch War of Independence, the end of the Seige of Leiden. (This is also known as the--gasp!--Eighty Years’ War, which makes me grateful we live in an era of shorter, if no less bloody, conflicts.) The citizens of Leiden had starved for a year under the onslaught of the Spanish. They were finally liberated by a ragtag band of Dutch rebels known as the Water-geuzen (“Sea Beggars”), a disparaging nickname applied to them by agents of the Spanish king. The Dutch confederates reappropriated the slur proudly, announcing they’d gladly become beggars in the cause of their nation’s freedom. It is this act of Geuzennaam (Reappropriation), the making of an insult into an honored title, that we examine as a virtue today. 
 
For those whose grasp of European history is as spotty as mine, the short version: In the 16th century, the nigh-omnipotent Spanish Empire had control of much of Europe and the New World, including the Netherlands. The Inquisition held sway, and Spain’s king, Phillip II, had it in for the Protestants living in Dutch provinces. The Dutch nobles resented Spain’s domination of their up-to-then disunited counties and came together under William of Orange, a prince who’d been raised both Catholic and Lutheran and believed in religious freedom. Hundreds of nobles marched to the palace of Margaret, half-sister of King Phillip, to air their grievances, only to be dismissed by one of Margaret’s counselors, who said, to boot, “Why should we be afraid of this bunch of beggars (gueux)?”

The rebels embraced the insult, and the term “Geuzen” (Beggars) became their party’s title. They took the symbols of beggarhood, the wallet and the bowl, as their emblems (worn proudly as medals such as the one shown above). For their motto they took the sarcastic sentiment “Loyal to King Phillip, to the point of poverty”--hinting that their fidelity had reached its limit with the loss of their prosperity and religious freedom.

Seven years later, in 1573, the Dutch town of Leiden came under seige by Phillip’s brutal general, the Duke of Alva. The detailed story makes for a harrowing tale. After a year as hostages, the Leideners had to break the dykes and flood their own city in order to let William of Orange and the Watergeuzen sail to the rescue. During the last month, with no food, the people faced constant temptation to surrender to the Spanish. To shore up his citizen’s crumbling resolve, the mayor offered to let them eat his own arm. (As dramatic gestures go, you gotta hand it to him. Get it? Hand it to him? Okay, sorry, too much caffeine this morning...)

As to the virtue of Geuzennaam: Most of us are probably familiar with modern examples, such as the taking back of the word queer by homosexuals, the word Witch by Reclaiming activists, the word redneck  by blue collar Southerners, or the “n word” by African-American rappers (still so volatile it’s not easy to print it!) The artist Kara Walker has attempted Geuzennaam on the word “Negress.” Older examples include the term Yankee for an American (taken from the mocking song “Yankee Doodle,” sung by British troops to make fun of American rebels), or the terms Whigs and Tories for the British political parties.

I previously touched on the Confucian virtue of Zhèngmíng (the Rectification of Names) in our essay on the Kwaanza virtue Kujichagulia (Self-Determination).  Geuzennaam is a very specific form of these virtues--manifest not by changing the name applied to us by others, but rather by embracing it while changing its meaning. This is an uber-cool form of magical lingo-judo, turning the attacker’s power against itself. Geuzennaam transcends intended humiliation with Truth. Root virtues of Geuzennaam include Wisdom, Integrity, Humility, and Humor.

We don’t even have to belong to a marginalized group to engage in Geuzennaam. Consider the Meredith Brooks song “Bitch”, in which the singer embraces the term as a title of power. Or how Kirstie Alley titled the sitcom based on her life Fat Actress. Another example comes from the film Fried Green Tomatoes, when Buddy Jr., a boy who survives a train accident but loses his leg, is lovingly christened “Stump” by his Aunt Idgie, who insists Buddy apply the name to himself with pride before kids start to tease him with it as a slur.

Back to the Eighty Years’ War: The beggarly-but-heroic Watergeuzen saved Leiden. To this day, the citizens of Leiden commemorate the taking back of their city from the Spanish with Leidens Ontzet, a raucous street party of all-night dancing and revelry. And to this day, the Dutch use the term Geuzennaam for people taking back a slur and turning it into a badge of pride. So today, celebrate the beauty of transcending disgrace with Truth and Love. Meditate on a time when someone hurled a slur at you, and how much it hurt. Think about how we, like the Sea-Beggars, can Reappropriate the labels applied to us by others. We can use magical lingo-judo to convert humiliation into Humor and Humility.

May we see the gates of Geuzennaam, and perhaps make a home there.