Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Coronavirus, Butterflies, & the Jeweled Net of Indra

    Coronavirus, Butterflies, & the Jeweled Net of Indra

    In the early months of Covid19, I was awed by how rapidly the virus leapt oceans and permeated cities.  Who would have thought that deforestation in China, bats, and Wuhan residents encountering (presumably) pangolins at a market would within a few months impact every person on the planet?  I’m reminded of “The Butterfly Effect,” that bit of chaos theory that describes “the dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.”  The idea that a
    butterfly flapping on one side of the planet results in a hurricane on the other seems quaint until that flap is a pathogen.
     
    When I was in spiritual direction training, a question we were taught to ask and which in the years since has proven endlessly fruitful, was “What invitation do these circumstances present to you?”  In other words, no matter what life deals us, there’s always an invitation to grow, to do good, to create, to love.  Since mid-March I’ve been wondering what the Coronavirus’s invitation is.  I don’t think the virus was sent by an all-powerful deity to teach us a lesson; I blame human destruction of the environment and lack of concern for public health and the bare reality that horrible things simply happen sometimes.  Even so, we can read the world like a book.  What does Covid19 say?
     
    You are vastly interconnected.  What any one person does matters to everyone. 
     
    In a postmodern world crammed with 7.8 billion people, on an endangered planet in a threatened democracy shot through with intractable social and racial injustice, most of us assume we’re too small to make a difference.  Covid19 says otherwise, albeit in a dark manner.
     
    So I’ve been thinking about the tangible and intangible ways we’re linked to one another, and what difference this makes.  Early on in the lock-down, after we’d only spent a few weeks in isolation, I was out on a walk when a biker breezed past, waving and shouting at pedestrians, “Greetings, fellow humans!”  Her safe form of cheer rippled up the street.  We know quality of presence matters: Think of a relentlessly encouraging teacher or the friend who’s great at asking questions or the spiritual practitioner whose calm radiates through a room; think of how a kindness given to you in childhood still nourishes you today; think of the anonymous person who planted the tree outside your window.  Hurt and evil spread the same way.  We may not see the results of our presence, intentions, and actions, we rarely can measure them, and yet their impact is profound.  As my teacher Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Virtues are actual streams of radial energy changing outcomes in the physical world.”  Goodness matters.  Even faith in goodness matters.  Immensely.
     
    I love the image of the Jeweled Net of Indra from the Atharva Veda.  In the heavenly abode of the god Indra, there’s a vast web extending infinitely in all directions.  At each intersection rests a glinting jewel.  Look closely at any one and every other jewel is mirrored there. 
     
    We are each a jewel in a mighty net.  When we are unaware of this, disasters like the pandemic happen.  When we are aware and bring whole, open hearts to our common plight, the net sparkles.  During this sad holiday of separation, I wish you health, comfort, and ever-increasing awareness of the bright net that binds us. 

    You may also enjoy reading:

    Open My Ears That I Might Hear

    Die Before You Die

    Writing as Longing

  • Aim Small. Dig Deep.

    Aim Small. Dig Deep.

    What’s Thanksgiving without family? I’m in a funk about the holidays, feeling stranded in the middle of the country while relatives I’m desperate to see are isolated in their homes on either coast. Too much time has passed without family visits, the older generation is swiftly aging, and the sad tolls of the pandemic mean we need our loved ones now more than ever. Covid restrictions mean I can’t even gather our local “family of choice” around the table. To add insult to injury, one of my tiny family of three is vegetarian and another gluten- and dairy-free. So much for tradition.

    I need an attitude adjustment.

    Recently I found these words in my writing notebook: “Aim small. Dig Deep.” I’d written them as an admonition to myself around publishing. My tendency once I finish a project is to drift into visions of, if not fame and fortune, at least a significant impact with a glimmer of recognition. I must have been reading Seth Godin, marketing guru, who advises people with a product to sell to ask the question, “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?” When I take his question seriously, my answer is one: me. Extending the question to marketing my work, my answer is similarly small. If my words move a handful of readers, then yes, they’re worth the effort of launching them.

    I’m privileged to answer this way because I’m not dependent on writing for income and can determine “worth” with intangible measures. Writing is indispensable to me when it brings me joy, connects me to my source, and orients my heart toward what’s life-giving. Sharing what I write is worthwhile when my words move a reader, however slightly—when they offer hope or delight or insight, when challenge or nudge, when the reader benefits, even incrementally, for having read them. For me, the measure of worth isn’t numbers so much as connection to the source of life.

    This is an odd thing to apply to the seats around our Thanksgiving table, I know, but I do think the “aim small, dig deep” principle is appropriate here. Sure I want the thrill of traveling, the relief of a break from Covid monotony, the fun of loved ones’ company, and the delicious feast, but at the core what I long for is the exchange of love that comes so easily when we’re together—the movement. I need to keep my focus on that exchange, which takes effort from a distance but is still possible. Rather than being bitter about my circumstances, can I delight in our threesome, cherish our warm home, give thanks for our health, and make time for lingering phone calls with family? Rather than taint our little celebration with misgivings, isn’t it better to set my sights so low that I’m thoroughly grateful?

    The practice of aiming small isn’t selling ourselves short; it’s accepting what is. The practice of digging deep asks us not to fall back on the way we’ve always done things but instead bring intention to what we most value. I’m almost there, but first I need a good cry.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • 2020 Dreaming

    2020 Dreaming

    How’s this for a quintessential dream in the year 2020?

    My family and I are on zoom with our pastor, a white-haired lesbian whom I adore. In the middle of our serious pastoral visit, Paula’s teenage son interrupts with some wry comment about our current political climate. He means to elicit laughs but also exposes a profound cynicism and despair. I’m struck by how even teenagers mess with parents’ attempts to work from home. How many zoom meetings have featured my daughter’s demand for attention?!

    Paula takes this very seriously. She abruptly turns away from us, removes her guitar from its case, and begins singing a folk song. Her attention is so fiercely directed to her son, she forgets we’re still there, watching from the screen.

    My family knows this song. The words lift us out of our culture’s tit-for-tat, reactive, short-sighted discourse into a broader worldview, one that uplifts humanity’s potential for good and sees this time of struggle as one moment in the immense sweep of evolutionary history. Then I see what Paula is doing. Her conversation with us isn’t nearly as important as responding to her son—not to his interruption but to his despair. In tending him, she also tends us. My whole family feels lighter for watching this loving exchange. We sing along. Afterward we laugh about how Paula forgot us.

    Most night dreams are deeply personal but the themes of this one—relationships mediated by screens, work interrupted, pervasive despair—are ubiquitous today, so I offer it as a metaphor that may speak to many of us. The pastor completely forgot she was in the middle of a work conversation, a fact that struck me in the dream (and still strikes me) as funny but also wise. Whatever we were discussing, it wasn’t nearly as pressing as her child’s hopelessness, and this she addressed with music, with a worldview expansive enough to embrace today’s suffering along with its goodness, and with her complete attention. Instead of focusing her ministry stubbornly outward, toward us and her professional obligations as she clearly intended and as we were expecting, she turned it inward, toward her son. Still, we received the benefits. Her parenting inadvertently sent ripples over cyberspace into our hearts.

    The crises of our times are overwhelming. And Covid has tied our hands; we can’t offer solutions the way we’d like to, the way we know is most effective—in person, together. My dream tells me to trust deeply in work we can do at home, alone and within our families. We can prioritize the intimacy between hearts. We can counter despair with music. We can zoom out to a bigger, more loving perspective. And we can lean on invisible cables of light to carry this work where it needs to go.

    Emily and I frequently sing an old Bob Franke folk song called “Thanksgiving Eve.” (Here’s a nice version sung by Julie Lambert.)  It’s not the song my pastor plucked out in the dream but it’s in a similar spirit, calling us out of our smallness:

    It’s so easy to dream of the days gone by,
    it’s hard to think of the times to come.
    But the grace to accept every moment as a gift
    is a gift that is given to some.
    What can you do with your days but work and hope
    That your dreams bind your work to your play?
    What can you do with each moment of your life
    but love ’til you’ve loved it away?
    Love ’til you’ve loved it away.

    Today I pull out my rusty-stringed guitar and sing this for you.

        --Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
  • No Justice, No Peace

    No Justice, No Peace

    Was it really only two weeks ago that Emily, Gwyn, and I sat on the capitol mall chanting, “No justice, no peace!” from behind our Covid masks, the smell of smoke still hanging in our cities, the national guard an intimidating phalanx of militarism circling the building, with the perpetual chop of helicopters overhead?  Today is summer at its most glorious—sun spangling leaves, a hot blue sky.  To see people streaming around the city lakes, you’d think Minneapolis has returned to normal (as though life in a pandemic killing thousands, especially the poor and people of color, is normal).  All you need is a drive down burnt and boarded up Lake Street to dismantle that illusion.

    I’ve been pondering our chant which has become what Al Sharpton calls the “rallying cry” of Black Americans whenever a “grave miscarriage of justice” befalls the disenfranchised.  When we shouted it to that white-domed seat of government defended by armed and armored guardsmen (and they were all men), the statement “No justice, no peace” was conditional; we were saying to those in power, “We’re going to disrupt the peace until everyone on our streets is treated humanely, and until the discriminatory, violent police force is held accountable.”  When the due process of law and the customary machinations of democracy don’t lead to equitable change, people use the only power they can—disrupting peace with protest—to leverage change.  And when peaceful protest repeatedly fails, what other recourse do the disenfranchised have but to wreck havoc?

    While I would never condone the destruction that laid waste to what was a vibrant swath of my neighborhood, I certainly understand it. What does it take to be heard?  What will it take to see change?  (The white supremacists and anarchists, however, who leapt into a volatile situation with a lit match, who raced through my neighborhood in trucks with lights off and license plates removed, and who I believe are responsible for far more arson than has been reported—these I hold accountable as terrorists engaged in racially charged urban warfare on a spectrum of continuity with the violent lawlessness of our police. These are the people I fear.) 

    In fact, the phrase, “No justice, no peace” is a metaphysical statement, an irreducible truth that describes how the world functions, with no exceptions.  If a society is unjust, it is never peaceful.  Justice and peace are inextricable, critical components of one another.  The reason we don’t know this is because we assume we are separate from one another rather than intricately interdependent; I assume that, if my life is peaceful, surely others’ lives should be peaceful too, and if I experience justice, surely everyone must.  Those who know the privilege of a dominant race, culture, economic status, gender, or sexual orientation find it easy to be complacent, to blame the victim.  In one of my favorite passages from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

    This is the truth the Black Lives Matters movement chants in hopes that people of privilege will wake up.  When I yell “No justice, no peace” to the powers that be, I also shout it to myself.  Open your eyes; know this single, spectacularly colorful and mutually dependent garment of which you are a part!              –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • A Place to Begin

    On the one hand, my eleven-year-old daughter is pasted to the screen five hours a day, participating in a sad simulacrum of school.  Bleary, she gazes at a moving collage of her classmates trying their best to glean companionship.  During “recess,” she plays “tag” at six feet with the neighbor kid, the only child Gwyn interacts with during this stay-at-home order.  I want to cry.

    On the other hand, for the first time in her life Gwyn can’t wait to get off the computer and race outside.  Attention disabilities and sensory sensitivities have made outdoor, solitary play nigh impossible for Gwyn, but the combination of medication and an abundance of time have introduced a new arena of fun.  She builds a tent.  She makes fairy houses.  She hangs a zip line for her dolls.  Secretly I watch from the window as my daughter loses herself under the lilac and finds that generative inner quiet I’ve always wished for her.

    Meanwhile, the sky over our house, usually roaring with planes, is silent.  Instead of breathing fumes first thing in the morning, the air is fresh.  I don’t know if this year’s migration is more lively or I’m just noticing it—yesterday a bald eagle circled over my garden.  When I walk to the park, total strangers swerve to avoid me but then look me in the eye, smile, and say hello.  We’re all so desperate for human contact, we welcome everyone into our sphere of interaction.

    That tiny sidewalk dance—steer clear (out of fear? as an act of care?), then deliberately connect—is emblematic of this awful time.  We have to avoid one other for the sake of the whole.  It’s tragic, especially for those who are lonely and vulnerable.  Our inability to be together magnifies the suffering wrought by illness, loss, care-giving, economic hardship, and unparalleled global change.  Our hearts hurt.

    Precisely because our hearts hurt, however, we’re willing to see the stranger whose proximity we’re avoiding and offer a greeting.  Where before our fearlessness in passing inches from an unknown shoulder was thoughtless, now our connection is intentional.  Those who say hello do so consciously.

    Gwyn is doing something similar in our small urban yard.  She’s choosing to be in relationship with the grass, with her cart-wheeling body, with the ladybug she meticulously “rescues,” with the robin who teases her overhead.  Deprived of friends, she’s making new ones.  Mentally taxed, she’s moving into a fuller way of being.

    As can we.  The question that presses at me daily now is this:  Will I allow myself to be changed for the better by this pandemic?  Today?  Even in the midst of grief and anger and fear?  With Christine Valters Paintner, I offer this sincere prayer:

    And when this has passed, may we say that love spread more quickly
    than any virus ever could. 
    May we say this was not just an ending
    but a place to begin.
    –“Praisesong for the Pandemic”

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Let’s cultivate an awareness that we’re connected.

    Greetings, fellow sojourners!  I am grateful for your distanced companionship through this difficult time.  Today I’d like to pass along a brief meditation and suggestions for writing or reflection that I wrote for Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality during Holy Week.  May it remind you of the vitality of your relationships regardless of your faith tradition.

    “Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people—it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people—it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

    Shortly after a fire destroyed all of my belongings, my spiritual director called. “What do you miss most?” she asked me, then patiently listened to the litany: the afghan my grandmother knit for my thirteenth birthday, irreplaceable photos, my sister’s elegant paper cuttings, the purple and blue quilt my mother stitched, hundreds of books, and journals—twenty years of journals. “You know, Elizabeth,” she said when I was done, “I believe you already contain everything that you need to remember.”

    At the time her words seemed callous; my loss was real, my grief wrenching. Over time, though, I’ve realized their truth. The objects we’ve lost, the places we’ve left, the people we can no longer visit: We contain them. They reside in memory and in our very cells. Those relationships continue. Sometimes I wonder whether their invisible, intangible, ongoing life is even more real than what we presume to be reality.  

    Today, as we traverse Holy Week and endure a sustained period of separation and crisis, I invite you to attend to memories as portals for relationship. This morning I read the passage from Mark where Jesus talked with the disciples about what was to come: He would suffer, be rejected, and killed. Peter and the others couldn’t bear the thought of losing their beloved teacher. But Jesus entered the week with deep trust in the continuity of relationships despite separation, and the continuity of life despite death. I hope the following writing prompts help you find this truth within your own story.

    Writing Prompts

    Write three memories. These exercises can be done in as little as ten minutes each. Write freely, as a form of exploration and listening, without concern for what others might think.

    • Consider a beloved who has died, who nonetheless has been present to you since. When and how have you experienced their presence? Choose one moment. Describe the scene, both what happened externally and what you sensed internally.
    • Who do you consider to be your wisdom teacher? Perhaps this is someone you know, perhaps they’re a saint or holy person, perhaps you’ve only read this person’s books. Write down their name. Then think of a moment when you were not physically together, when this person was nonetheless present to you, guiding your thoughts or comforting you or urging you forward. Describe that moment. Be sure to use your senses, attending to both external and internal movements.
    • Who do you dearly miss today because of the need to remain socially distant? Describe that person in detail, including their beloved attributes as well as shortcomings. Then reflect on some of the ways this person is present to you, within you, regardless. Perhaps you share a gesture, sense of humor, love of an activity, curiosity, or failing. How, other than through communicating, are you in relationship with them?     

    Meditation from Merrit Malloy’s poem, “Epitaph”:

    Love doesn’t die,
    people do.
    So, when all that’s left of me
    is love,
    give me away.

  • Welcome, Virus

    For the first time since this virus hit the U.S., last night I woke up scared.  My chest cinched with worry; my breathing was shallow.  I’m a little bit afraid of getting sick, but mostly I’m scared for the vulnerable people I love and for those in our communities who are already hit with financial hardship, social isolation, and the burdens of handling this epidemic.  My heart beats frantically, terrified of this new reality which won’t necessarily go away when the virus recedes.  Welcome, fear.

    This morning I’m grieving.  My eleven-year-old is home from school, purportedly for three weeks but likely more.  I’ve lost half of my work time; she’s lost a routine with a teacher she adores and group learning where she thrives and a public school community that’s nurtured her for six years.  Our spring break plans to visit my in-laws, whom I love dearly and haven’t seen in ages, are canceled.  I’m sad for my aunt, who will turn eighty in a few weeks, holed up in a small apartment in Queens.  I weep for this rapidly changing world, my heart physically hurting.  Welcome, grief.

    I’m also pissed off, mostly at leaders who’ve been slashing social services for years and who haven’t overhauled the medical system to make it more accessible and versatile.  But I’m also mad at our wretched economic disparities that mean the wealthy can fly in private jets while the poor have no choice but to board the bus and work in crowded places.  I’m angry that nature can conjure up so virulent a disease.  I’m irate that those of us privileged enough to hunker down now, who’ve made such rapid lifestyle changes, haven’t responded to racial disparities or gun violence or the climate crisis anywhere near the same commitment when these are just as dire.  Fury flares through my body like fire.  Welcome, anger.

    Much as I want to push these feelings away, much as my to-do list is piling up with people to care for and long-neglected tasks I might as well tackle now that I’m stuck at home, I welcome what I’m experiencing in this moment, in my body, in my thoughts, in my emotions.  I’m practicing being present, because now is the only time, ever, to consent to love’s full potential.  Now is the only time I have to open myself to loving possibilities that are bigger than me.  Now, here, in my body.

    I can’t control this situation—none of us can.  The security we desperately want, for ourselves and our country, we will never get.  Nor will we receive the comfort of a magic solution, from either God or government.  We each can exercise our agency, making loving choices as best we’re able, but our agency has limits.  So what can we do?  We can accept these limits.  We can release, again and again, our needs for security, affection, and control.  We can embrace this moment as it is, fully welcoming the wisdom of the body, because in our fear and sadness and anger hides our immense love for this world, and that’s where divinity enters.   –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

    (I’ve leaned heavily on the Welcoming Prayer here, developed by Mary Mrozowski as an application of Centering Prayer for daily life.  You can learn more at Contemplative Outreach.)

  • A Real Life

    Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.     –James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

    Just how real the interior life is I’ve yet to discover, nor will I ever, which doesn’t stop me from relentlessly, endlessly seeking it. Daily I taste it’s effectiveness when the words I churn up onto the page change me, lending a glimmer of understanding, a sharpening perception. Occasionally those words move a reader too, although I rarely know why or how. Or when I meditate in silence, or when my imagination drifts before sleep, or, for that matter, when I literally dream and wake with an image—this morning a man surviving a car crash and then kissing the earth in gratitude: These intangible, interior movements have their counterparts in the exterior world. I do not wholly believe it yet, but I’m getting there.

    Last week I lost a friend with a magnificent interior. Michael Bischoff was a Quaker who spent countless hours in silence. He talked regularly with Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and with his own ancestors, and wrote about these experiences during his almost five-year “adventure” with cancer. For as long as he was able, he biked everywhere, including to his brain surgeries and radiation appointments. He spent hundreds of hours walking along the Mississippi, communing with the trees and birds. Michael struggled with insomnia for as long as I’ve known him; I imagine his nights full of anxiety, emptiness, prayer, applesauce, and the rich, real workings of the interior. Michael was a man of solitude.

    Hundreds turned up for Michael’s memorial service. We sat in silence and testified to the abundance of Michael’s gifts, mostly external: How he asked great questions; how at a gathering he once donned reflective gear and a helmet to throw himself onto the crowd; how present he was; how much he loved his family; what a great organizer and networker and story-teller… Between each sharing, the woman carrying the microphone walked slowly, ever-so-slowly, to the next person. Words settled down into silence. We returned to the interior, where I felt, palpably, unequivocally, Michael’s presence.

    Because group prayer for Michael always happened in the round, we had rearranged seating for 500 into a semblance of a circle, the first time in the staid old church a gathering had ever sat this way, and I sensed the physical power of Michael’s interior moving chairs, bringing us together, ushering us into relationship with one another and with the divine presence. I think of the team that coordinated the service, how I’ve become friends with Michael’s friends because of how intensely we’ve worked together these last weeks, and know without question that this is Michael’s doing, not after the fact but now, here, moving among us.

    The interior life is a real life and it’s the life that continues. It’s powerful beyond imagining, especially if entered with love. Michael is teaching me this, even now, in these words.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Shattering Glass

    I remember a moment in my mid-twenties with utmost clarity:  I stood just inside the door of my sunny first apartment and knew, suddenly, that the way I’d always understood myself—heterosexual, because that was what my family and community and culture presumed of me—was false.  The horror of realizing I was bisexual made me lose my balance.  I felt this awful shattering, as though the glass box I’d been living in had smashed open and now lay in shards at my feet.  Were I to move in any direction, I’d be cut.

    Today I’m struck by how real that glass seems.  I came out, wrote the story of coming out, and shared that story very publicly from pulpits, at conferences, and in print, and still that moment lives in me like an open wound, perhaps because I now know how thoroughly I can be deceived.  I lived twenty-five years without recognizing this central dimension of myself.

    Of course in hindsight I can point to the hundreds of ways I did know—my strange adolescent obsession with Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings; my solitary biking through the Welsh mountains in an instinct-driven attempt to distance myself from others’ influence; my paradoxical, inexplicable attractions… I pieced that puzzle together afterward.  A secret, silent part of me (my body, my intuition, my spirit?) knew; it nudged me with unhappiness and longing until, finally, I became aware.

    Back then I called it “coming out.”  Today I think of it more as a coming into consciousness.  What broke in me was an illusion.  The person standing alone in that sunny apartment, weeping uncontrollably, finally knew who she was, and while stepping out with that truth was painful, it was the most honest (and powerful) move I’ve ever made.

    I’m remembering this because I now see it as one in a lifetime of steps away from deception into self-awareness.  If I had to come out to myself about my sexual identity, how many other dimensions of who I am are hidden from me?  How can I come not just to know them but to live them with integrity?

    Hard as it was, my coming out experience gave me a template for what I now believe is our central work as a human beings:  To become fully, truly ourselves.  This is the spiritual path.  The Gospel of Thomas, an early text that itself was closeted from institutional Christianity’s awareness, quotes Jesus as saying, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”  In a broken world where need is overwhelming, there’s only one thing we need to do.  It’s simple but not easy.  We need to narrow the gap between what we profess in words and actions and who we are.  No other work is as effective at healing our planet.  We each have creative potential, truth, energy, and vision pressing within us like an unborn star, and our purpose is to let them stream through us as light.    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew