"All around me are familiar faces..."

"All around me are familiar faces,
Worn out places, Worn out faces,
Bright and early for the daily races,
Going nowhere, Going nowhere,
Their tears are filling up their glasses,
No expression, No expression,
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow,
No tomorrow, No tomorrow,
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad,
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had,
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take,
When people run in circles it's a very very,
Mad world, Mad world…"
- "Mad World"

I remember the first time I saw Los Angeles….or at least the hazy, gray megalopolis I thought was Los Angeles.  I had been driving cross-country for over a week.  Suddenly the empty desert of southeastern California gave way and in the distance...creeping closer with every mile...were the edges of what I thought was the City of Angels. A city I imagined to be the size of Philadelphia.  I assumed with that level of population density so soon, I must be near the city's epicenter.  I was wrong.  It would take me over two hours to reach the inner belt of urban Los Angeles and every mile felt like I was falling deeper and deeper into a looming grey hole.  I knew exactly one, count her…one, person in all of Southern California and she would be leaving soon after I arrived to begin my time house-sitting for she and her husband.

I was terrified.  Prior to this experience, my "city" had been New York City. Brownstones, brick cobbles, Washington Square and "the Village" were easy to navigate on a summer's evening...but this place was the color of asphalt and cement, concrete and steel...and for some reason it made me feel frantic and helpless...more alone than I had ever felt before. And because I was terrified, terror was all that I could see on the faces of men, women, and children I passed on street corners and observed at bus stops.   It took me weeks to discover that the hopelessness I was observing was really just a mental film over my own eyes coloring everything with a dull, gray, sad tone of despair.

I spent many lonely weeks in this gray mental fog until one afternoon when I was sitting on a concrete bench near the corner of Wilshire and Western. There I saw a young Korean mother and her toddler daughter waiting for the bus.  My first thought was, "I wonder where you would go if you could afford to get out of this place?"

But then the little girl turned to me and shot a 3 million megawatt smile in my direction.  It was like a strong gust of wind blowing the gray/hopelessness glasses off of my face and suddenly the world was suffused with color and charm.  I scootched over on the bench to where her mother was watching her daughter…obviously as smitten as I was…and cleared my voice.  She turned briefly in my direction before re-fixing her gaze on the little girl not ten inches from her side.  "Hello," I said. "Oh, hello," she replied.   "Do you live near here?" I asked.  "Oh no," she laughed shyly, "if only we could…"  Her palpable longing to live in this inner city neighborhood where dumpsters and concrete made up the "landscape" surprised me. 

She went on to explain that she, her husband and four children had only just come to America from Korea and were living with relatives in another town two hours away by bus.  Both she and her husband worked in the downtown neighborhood where we were sitting, but on separate shifts so that someone would be home for the children after school.  She brought Lea to work at the dry cleaners each day since her husband's bus left for downtown before her bus arrived home.  Lea, she explained was too much for her elderly mother to care for…in addition to the other three children…during the in between time.

"This is where I have dreamed of living since I was a little girl in Korea," she sighed. 

She told me, in halting English, that her dreams were coming true everytime she and Lea rode the bus to the corner of Wilshire and Western.  She then pointed to a bank of second story windows above a strip of shops where a Korean restaurant, dry cleaners, market, and insurance office stood.  "Someday we will live in an apartment above our own shop," she dreamed aloud.   The joy she exhaled seemed to be enough to drive my own hopelessness into exile.

Right at that moment I was sitting in someone's "dream come true".  The world of urban concrete and international commerce…filled with hand-lettered signs in languages I had never even heard spoken before…made sense to me through her eyes.  This was a place to come to…not a place where everyone was eager to leave…as I had imagined.

I looked around me and could find people who were smiling, purposeful, and at peace, whereas a mere hour before I saw only gray, resolute drones going from here to there and back again with robot-like mindlessness.  I saw what I felt.

There is a story in the Bible from the second chapter of Kings where the prophet Elisha and his servant are on the run from the Syrians and were finally trapped, surrounded in the city of Dothan by the enemy army.  Elisha's servant is "sore afraid" when he sees that they are compassed about by horses and chariots and a "great host". 

Elisha first assures his servant, "Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them."

Then he prays.  And his prayer, surprisingly, is not for deliverance. He doesn't hope for, or even ask God to show him a way of escaping Dothan or how to circumvent the army of Syria.

His prayer is "Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see."

And the story continues:  "And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha."

What only moments before had looked like an untenable situation that foretold sure doom, with "opened eyes" became not only a safe situation, but one where Elisha and his servant were "cared for, watched over, beloved and protected". 

That day I felt like Lea and her mother "opened my eyes" and everything gray and hopeless became full of color, beauty, opportunity and awakening.  

Later that week I decided that if I was going to be living in a big city with international neighbors, I would make it a time of discovery.  I started exploring international film, cooking, religions, and music.  Any given Saturday I could be found holed up in a Japanese cinema reading English subtitles under a classic Akira Kirowsawa film or visiting an Ethiopian restaurant for conversation, injira, and wat with a group of Rastafarians.  I spent a few too many Tuesday nights at a Salsa Club downtown and, sadly, not as many Friday evenings sharing Shabbat dinner with a fellow teacher from school.

My Los Angeles chapter was filled with color, music, exploration, adventure...and yes, some mistakes that I learned a great deal from.  A mother's dreams at a bus stop mid-city had opened my eyes to all that I was suddenly surrounded by.  Not horses and chariots of fire, but even better, the wonders of being a global citizen in an international city. And as an invested and engaged member of the human family, there were no longer any foreign faces... all faces became "familiar faces"... 

"…Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen…"

I'm still listening,
Kate

Camp and global consciousness

From the Porch of Crowsnest

(written while looking out from my porch, across the lawn and toward Valerie Lake)

Someone recently asked me how I, as a spiritual thinker deeply committed to global healing and the actualization of the divine  within each individual ...impartially and universally, could spend my summer at a camp high in the Rocky Mountains that serves the children of one religious denomination exclusively.

I have spent many, many hours thinking about this question this summer.  Here are my musings (discovered through in prayer)…. for what they are worth:

The days here are filled with opportunities to see the depth of diversity in those things which seem so alike.  A field of daisies when observed from a distance seems to repeat a pattern of yellow circular center and white petals, but when I get up from the Adirondack rocker on my porch and wander through that same meadow, carefully observing each flower, I note diversity and individuality that escaped my purview from a safe distance.  To get up close and personal, to be able to examine each flower in the context of its surrounding flora (how a blue columbine brings out the sharp loveliness of a daisy's simplicity, how a larger more mature daisy highlights the petite freshness of a new small bud) helps me better appreciate each daisy's uniqueness, as well as the divine intelligence that repeats such a lovely pattern of beauty.

So it is with camp.  Yes, each of our campers comes to this glorious place (in the palm of “five fingers” at the base of Mount Columbia) from the common genus of being a student enrolled in a Christian Science Sunday School.  But when seen in the context of one another's approach to this common perspective diversity (of inspiration, study styles, application and language for sharing those perspective) becomes clearer in the bas relief of another's individual way of approaching their spiritual journey.   We have campers from private boarding schools and urban public schools, from small islands in the Caribbean and from suburban midwest neighborhoods.

This lesson was so clear to me one summer not long ago when we had a camper arrive who, although enrolled and in faithful weekly attendance at a Christian Science Sunday school throughout the year, considered himself an agnostic (someone who believes it is impossible to know whether or not God exists) and professed to feel a growing alliance with atheism (disbelief in the existence of God).  Not only was he not sure that you could prove, or experience, the presence of a God that might exist, but he wasn't sure that God even existed at all.

This was unsettling to others who felt that a belief in Christian Science was the common ground that camp was based on.  But the requirements were not intellectual buy-in only a willingness to attend a Christian Science Sunday School, which this young man met on a weekly basis throughout the year.  In fact, this boy not only attended Sunday School, but was an active and vigorous participant in those classes, often frustrating teacher and fellow students with his genuine and well thought out questioning of what seemed to him to be pat answers to his deep and conscientious probing of  mass acceptance of cultural and religious paradigms.

Our first Sunday School class (I have to admit I begged to be assigned to his class) the question was asked of him, by another student, why he didn't believe in God.  I intervened and asked her to explain, rather, why she did.  And her answer followed the same patterns of scholastic rhetoric that had long frustrated this young man.  An answer that seemed well rehearsed about God being all and Truth being reliable.  I then asked her (and the rest of the class) to tell us of a time when she had actually experienced the presence of God and why she/they had attributed that experience to the divine.  She thought for a few moments and then shared with genuine tears, that revealed deep feelings connected with that experience, about a time when she was alone in the dark and too afraid to get out of bed to go to her parents in the middle of the night and the words from a hymn popped into her head and how she had felt a pure warm peace flow through her and she knew that there was indeed a God.

One after another the students in the class shared their examples until it finally came back to our resident agnostic/atheist.  He didn't say anything for a few moments and then shared an experience that he had had as a child that he always came back to when he was afraid.  By the end of that class not only had each of us been shown that just because we had all come to camp from the same starting point as Christian Science Sunday School students, but that in that sameness there were diverse ways of thinking through our common desire to know what was true.  It was also clear that there was a common thread of experience with the divine that united us.   It was our common experiences that nurtured a trust in the diversity of one another's journey towards the arrival at answers that would be satisfying and would bring peace.

So what does this have to do with my own inner confidence that this time at camp is contributing to the pool of spiritual seekers who are becoming well-prepared globally conscious thinkers?

Each day at camp our campers must go through the demands of keeping cabins clean, meeting schedules and deadlines, dealing with critical weather or environmental challenges from a spiritual perspective. These ever-changing demands require them to partner with other campers and counselors who bring a diversity of experience and approach to finding solutions they may have assumed, based on everyone being a Christian Scientist, would be handled in the same way they might.  Yet, the fact that they are each bringing new perspectives and vantage points to those challenges or the issues at hand offers important freshness and balance to the process of thinking and praying together for those solutions.   What they often realize is ... that what they really have most in common is the simple desire for a solution.  That this desire for good, for peace, for harmony or wellness is enough to bring about the needed change.   This new perspective has the potential for a new United Nations….a new spiritually confident “security council”.   Mrs. Eddy says that “security for the claims of harmonious and eternal being is found only in divine Science” (which she elsewhere defines as “God’s government of the universe inclusive of man”).  I love thinking that camp is giving our young men and women the opportunity to find secure and lasting peace.  And that they can discover that this deep peace is rooted in their certainty that no matter how different (or the same on the outside) we may appear, we can always trust that the message of Eddy's "Daily Prayer" is not a great humanly designed suggestion, but a divine imperative that promises this kind of lasting peace.   It reads:

               “Thy Kingdom come
               Let the Reign of divine Truth, Life and Love
               Be established in me, and rule out of me all sin.

               And may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind
               And govern them.”  - Mary Baker Eddy

As we grow in our experiences of trusting that there is a divine impetus working in each of us to enrich our affections for good, our hunger for peace, our desire for harmony, we will have confidence as peacemakers....surrounded by a glocal community of like-minded, like-hearted peacemakers. 

Isn’t this what camp is all about.  Starting out thinking we are the same, finding out that we are different, then discovering and resting upon the realization that what is common in us is God working in each of our hearts.

We are raising global  thinkers here in the "palm of five fingers", in the heart of the Collegiate peaks and I can’t wait to see where they find their niche in this vast global community.  Already we have counselors from this summer heading off to Peace Corps duties in South America, Asia and Africa.  We are a training ground for global transformation and I feel privileged to be part of this new generation of spiritually prepared ambassadors for good. 


K