AVOIDING THE SQUIRRELS

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” - William James

So, loyal parishioners, I’ve been thinking.  Perhaps even pondering.  Musing.  Cogitating.  And of course, you’re wondering what’s been going on in the crazy  Reverend’s head.  Well, I’m so glad you asked.  I’ve been thinking about tolerance.

I believe in tolerance.  I really BELIEVE in it.  I don’t just think it’s a good idea.  I WORK at it.  Hard.  And it’s reflected in my life.  I have friends who represent a broad range of philosophies.  Wacky right to wacky left.  Hippie to Evangelical Christian.  Biker to drag queen.  Gay, straight, old, young, all races and religions.  And I can find common ground with all of them. Regardless of who they are or what they believe, there’s more places where we agree then disagree.  And I work HARD to remember that fact when something comes up that exposes places where we differ.  If I listed the ten most important qualities in human beings, I’d put tolerance pretty close to the top.  But there’s a limit to my practice, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it.

If you believe in tolerance, practice it and live it, what do you do about the intolerant?  I know.  We’re practically drowning in irony here.  But I can’t find it in myself to tolerate the intolerant.  I have no problem with Islam, but when whole countries deny humanity to half their citizens because of their gender it makes me fucking nuts.  If you want to believe in Jesus, go right ahead.  But when a bunch of you idiots get together to demonize people who love each other and want to form a family, I want to put your fucking head in a car door and slam it a few times.  And those aren’t very tolerant views.  What a mess.

Is there a limit to tolerance?  Should there be?  And is that limit the place where you run into intolerance?  I’m not sure.  I wish I could be tolerant of everyone.  My spirit tells me it’s the right thing to do.  But that hardly seems practical, because if you allow intolerance to run unchecked you frequently end up with slavery or concentration camps.  So perhaps we should stand up to intolerance.  Call it out for the shitty hatred it represents.  But then aren’t we practicing the very thing we’re trying to abolish?  I just don’t know.

The best answer I can come up with is that tolerance is just a human idea, and like all human endeavors, it’s deeply flawed.  So once again I guess I have to learn to live with conflict within myself.  Practice tolerance, but refuse to accept the intolerant.  Take it on a case by case basis.  Sometimes I wish I was a little smarter, a little wiser, a little better.  But you have to work with what you’ve got.  Do you have any better ideas?  If so, email me or hit me up on facebook or twitter.  (All that info is on the contact page.)

Oh well.  Enough of that.  C’est la vie.  And if you’re religious please try to remember this little sermon in a few days.  Because I’ve about had it with churches and I feel a very angry rant coming on.  I’ll just apologize in advance!  Vaya con Dios and Viva la Revolucion.

Well boys and girls, I’m back already.  My last post stirred up lots of muck in this defective old brain and whenever that happens the voice of the almighty comes roaring through.  (For the uninitiated, as a Reverend I speak to God regularly.  As a thinking person, I refuse to believe in an anthropomorphized supernatural being.  You figure it out.)  So anyway, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by parentheses?  Oh yes, stirrings in the muck…

When last we met I prattled on about my experiences at the soon to be lamented Bodhi Tree.  This got me to thinking about Malcolm Gladwell.  Do you know who he is?  Do you care?  He’s a writer who’s written two fabulous, thought provoking books.  (I know he’s written more than two, I just particularly liked these two.  (And sorry for the parentheses again (Oooh parentheses in parentheses in parentheses.  I better stop before I go blind.)))  The first is called The Tipping Point and it deals with… well, never mind.  That’s not what I want to talk about.  But go read it, especially if you’re interested in how societies change.  The one I want to talk about is The Outliers.  Pretty cool book, but I won’t go on and on about it either.  I’ll just mention one idea that really struck me; the 10,000 hour rule.

Mr. Gladwell is very interested in highly accomplished people.  He interviews them and ruminates on their success.  And one of the things he decides is that to truly understand a thing or master a skill you need to spend 10,000 hours doing it.  Think about it.  10,000 hours.  That’s a lot, but I think he’s probably got it about right.  Wanna play a musical instrument?  10,000 hours of practice.  Be good at a martial art?  10,000 hours on the mat.  Really get a handle on some task at your job?  Well, you get the idea.

Since I’m now what some people would consider middle-aged, there are a few things I’ve spent 10,000 hours doing, for better or worse.  What are they and what does this mean for my life?  Here’s what I’ve thought of so far, discounting all the obvious shit like eating and sleeping:

Martial Arts- Absolutely.  That’s probably good.

Teaching- Way more than 10,000.  Also pretty good.

Reading- Yep.  Still good.

Having Sex- Probably somewhere around 10,000 hours, but harder to figure accurately.  What can I say.  I like sex.

Watching bad movies-  Maybe not such a good thing.

Working out/running- That’s cool.

Driving- Okay, I guess.

Being stoned/drunk- Again, this one is hard to figure, but I might be getting close.  Probably not such a good thing.

Watching Baseball- A fan is a fan.

Worrying or stressing- Okay, this one sucks.  I think I’ll stop now.

So, what have you spent 10,000 hours doing?  What are you succeeding at?  I can’t help but think about my late teacher George Leonard who always used to say “Practice makes perfect and you’re always practicing something”.  What are you perfecting?  And if you don’t like the answer, start something new.  It’s not too late.  Vaya con Dios and Viva la Revolucion!

I’m afraid I may have to disappoint you with my latest sermon.  I know you trust your beloved Reverend to provide you with some snark, a little sarcasm, and a slightly off kilter view of the world.  Today, not so much.  Today I’m likely to be corny, a little bit serious, and not the least bit cynical.  And I expect you to do the same.  Put away your well earned skepticism and listen up, fuckers.  Because this personal.  And it might have universal implications.

In 1985 I moved from NY to LA and I was a hot steaming mess.  Just married into a doomed union, just out of therapy, just having left IBM, and just totally fucking lost.  My abusive shithead parents had convinced me I was a worthless clod and I had no idea what to do next.  No church, no community, not too many friends, and no clue.  Besides that I was too smart for my own good, had the attention span of a teenaged gnat on speed, was pretty crappy at taking suggestions, and seethed with righteous anger.  Without a little luck I was probably destined to be shooting coeds from a tall building.  “Gee officer, he always seemed so quiet and polite before he started collecting body parts.”  And then I walked into The Bodhi Tree.

Reading had always been my escape and my saving grace.  I read with incredible speed and remember almost everything.  For my first LA job I found work in a bookstore because they were the closest thing to a refuge I knew.  And in the first few months I made sure I visited all the best ones in the area.  That’s how I ended walking into The Bodhi Tree.  My life turned around.  The pebble dropped, and I’m still riding the ripples.  And after 40 years that store, that incredible, unique place, is closing.  Fuck us all.

Most of you have probably never heard of, let alone visited The Bodhi Tree.  Started in 1970 by two couples, it’s a big ass converted house on Melrose in West Hollywood.  A ‘niche’ bookstore, with a used annex in the house around the corner.  It has little rooms, a heavy incense odor, free cups of tea, a couple of bulletin boards, and about a zillion books on shit you can’t even imagine.  If it involves religion, spirituality, growth or human potential, they have it.  Jesus to crystals, martial arts to psychology to cookbooks.  No judgments, no agenda, just every damn book you’d ever need in order to learn something about human inner life.  And it saved my fucking life.

Starting in early 1986 until I moved north in 1989 I practically worshipped at Bodhi Tree.  At least one long afternoon every week was spent browsing through every freakin section.  Gee, this book mentions Astral Projection.  What the hell is that?  Oh, there’s a whole section on it.  I still have hundreds of books that came from there.  Sure, a lot the books and ideas didn’t speak to me, but some of them did.  And those books, on Taoism, Buddhism, Tai Chi, Meditation, etc, became my starting point.  I learned some pretty profound lessons in that store.  Like fulfillment might come with service to others rather than expansion of self.  And that there are a lot of ways to find joy.  And that it doesn’t matter if the regular world thinks you’re nutty if you’ve found an answer that eases your pain.  Without this resource I would not be who I am today.  I would be lesser.

Now I know what some of you are thinking.  Why Reverend, all that information is on the world wide webs.  Today you can access all that on your magic little laptop.  And to you I say “Bullshit”.  I know the amazing Google God can find anything in .074699 seconds.  But it has one giant fucking limitation.  You have to know what you’re looking for.  If your question is “I wonder about _______?” it’s fabulous.  But if you’re question is just “I wonder.” it totally sucks.  And “I wonder.” is a far more important question.  Look, in order to use digital information you have to have a concrete starting point.  But the deepest questions, the most profound ponderings, have no starting point.  A search engine wouldn’t have helped me at all because I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR.  What would I type in the little box?  Depressed, unfulfilled with existential angst?  Go ahead, try it.  Nothing too useful comes up.  Type “I wonder” into your browser and you won’t get many useful answers.

The Bodhi Tree had answers.  In fact it had thousands of the fucking things.  Turns out that, unbeknownst to my 23 year old self, all kinds of people had asked the same questions, and their answers were all in one magical place.  And it had more that just the books.  It had resources.  I found my first meditation class, my first Tai Chi teacher, my first Taoist lecture, my first Buddhist Temple.  I could go on and on.  My first Karate school, my first Aikido Dojo, my first human potential seminar.  Every one came through the Bodhi Tree or through a contact I found out about at the Bodhi Tree.  So what becomes of a world without this kind of place?

The Bodhi tree is closing for all the usual reasons.  The people who started it are getting older.  Amazon and the chains have hurt them.  The economy sucks and business is down.  But also, I think, the world has changed.  “I wonder” doesn’t seem to be that important a question any more.  Christians stay Christian and Jews stay Jewish.  Liberals stay democrat and rich white kids stay republican.  Middle class kids go to school to learn more about the world they inhabit, not to learn about worlds they can’t even imagine.  Everyone lives in their own little spiritual ghetto, unwilling to say “I don’t know” and start over.  Google serves the times.  It fills in blanks in the dominant pedestrian narrative.  Bodhi Tree let you start whole new story.  When it closes it’s doors the world will be a much poorer place.  And I will mourn.  And maybe, so should you.  Everyone I ever touched, every child I’ve helped and every piece of advice I’ve offered, started in that store.  And I’ll remember it fondly ever time I say “I wonder…”,

Vaya con Dios my friends, and Viva la Revolucion.  Because it ain’t coming fast enough.

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.” - Marian Wright Edelman

Brothers and sisters of the imaginary flock, we are gathered here in our electronic, non-temporal way again.  And I’m warming up my imaginary deeply resonant voice to preach again.  And it occurs to me that most all of my sermons involve change, and not the few cents collected in my virtual collection plate.  Change as in trying something new, giving up old patterns to find new, funner and freer ones.  And as we all know, change sucks.  It requires us to take risks, give up a certain level of comfort, and it collects in the compartments of your car.  Well, so it goes.  We all probably knew that.  But change is hard for another, more subtle reason.  When it goes bad we know it all at once, but when it works we might not see the effects for many years.  The slow pace means we might miss the benefits all together.  And that’s why change takes faith,

Thinking about this reminded me of yet another story.  A true one.  When I was still young and naive enough to think that world could be saved (you know, in college)  I was involved with a couple of oral history projects with a professor.  We were interviewing black World War Two vets on their experiences returning to the segregated country they had defended.  One particularly eloquent older gentleman had been a sergeant in Italy.  His company had taken incredible casualties and then he returned to Mississippi.  As he related the indignities visited upon him by ignorant white crackers I got overly enthusiastic and strayed from my script.  (Yeah, I know.  Following directions has never been my strong point.  But he didn’t mind.)  I asked him, in my naive middle class white boy way, why he and his returning compatriots didn’t rebel?  Why did the civil rights movement wait 20 more years?  And damned if he didn’t know the answer!

I still remember the first line of his answer exactly, but I’ll have to paraphrase the rest.  He said “Son, I just couldn’t do it.  But I made damn sure my kids could”.  He talked about how no matter what his military experience taught him, he was still the product of a racist society.  He said ‘Yessir” and ‘No Ma’am’ and couldn’t really make himself stop.  Even though he knew intellectually that he was equal, the brutal reality of his upbringing meant that he could never quite get there emotionally.  But he raised three sons to believe something that he was never told.  That they were equal.  To ANYONE.  And they believed him, as did their friends.  And their generation gets the credit for one of the best things to happen to this country.  But it was their father’s and mother’s that changed.  Even if many of them never got to see a black skinned man take the oath of office.

There’s a chinese belief that demons are inherited.  (I know, that was a hard left turn without a good segue.  Bad flow, bad writer.  Oh well, sucks to be me.)  I like this belief, even if I’m skeptical about the demon part.  We all fight our parent’s battles over again if they didn’t win it first.  An abusive father has abusive sons and abusive grandsons, on and on.  But if one generation says “NO” and fights the demon that leads to abuse, that demon might be killed and that abuse might not move forward.  The results of that change will resonate through a thousand generations.  That, folks, is change you can believe in.

Change.  It sucks.  And you might not see the results in your lifetime.  Too bad.  Suck it up and do what’s right.  Do the hard work and the heavy lifting.  Don’t leave it for some future generation.  And teach your kids to do shit you can’t.  You might not change this world but you will change some future one.  Viva la revolucion.  Amen.