“Does Justin Trudeau Apologize Too Much?” That was the headline in my news feed one day back in March. This BBC article went on to point out that the Prime Minister of Canada has issued four formal apologies for past injustices since he was elected in 2015, more than any other Prime Minister ever, including his father. The video accompanying the article shows Prime Minister Trudeau saying “we’re sorry” over and over and over again.
There were several spiritual themes in this headline: apology, atonement, forgiveness, but the words that I kept coming back to were “too much”—apologizing too much. Although it is a joke that Canadians apologize all the time anyway, in that headline, I heard the cultural message that apology is weakness. How can a leader be strong if he apologizes too much? How can a country be strong if its leader is weak?
At about the same time in the United States, the current president and a former vice-president were dueling on social media about who would have beaten up who behind the high school gym—and all in the name of defending the honor of women. (Honestly, I couldn’t have made that up.)
Our leaders called each other weak and crazy; one of them said that the other would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” He might just as well have called the other that ultimate insult; he might just as well have called him a girl.
There it was in both news stories: toxic masculinity. This term has been used for some time in psychology and gender studies and was brought into common usage and our collective consciousness with the #MeToo Movement. It is a further reflection of patriarchy, yet another dimension of white supremacy culture.
The Good Men Project defines toxic masculinity this way:
….a narrow and repressive description of manhood…[that is defined] by violence, sex, status and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly “feminine” traits are the means by which your status as “man” can be taken away.
One thing about toxic masculinity is that it creates a binary relationship that requires and defines a toxic femininity: a narrow and repressive description of womanhood as passive, weak, vulnerable, and hyper-emotional. This gender binary requires that we say we are this or that—male or female, masculine or feminine. Science tells us that gender is not binary—it is a continuum. Activists in the GLBTQ Movement are teaching us that gender binary is a destructive falsehood that denies the reality of our wholeness. Culture is shifting, if not fast enough.
This idea is not new–the idea that there is a wholeness that includes the masculine and the feminine, and that a wide range of traits are present in all people. This is an idea that has been a part of religion traditions for millennia.
A few weeks ago, our intern minister, Crystal Zerfoss, preached about the symbol of Yin Yang, which is most commonly associated with Taoism. Crystal said, “the Yin Yang is used to depict how what we might describe as opposing or contrary forces may actually be interconnected and interdependent; how they might complement one another resulting in the whole being greater than the assembled parts.”
In this symbol, the parts are intertwined into a whole, and each part has a dot of the other within it. This is a symbolic representation of duality-the idea that seemingly opposed things can exist simultaneously, that something or someone can be this AND that. This is in contrast to the idea of binary-polarity that requires diametric opposition, that we claim this OR that.
This idea of both-and shows up in the work of Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and Zen priest. She draws on the foundational tenant of Buddhism-the oneness of all things– to develop a contemplative care model for being with those who are at the end of life. One of the core messages of her Being With Dying project is “strong back, soft front.” She explores in depth, the relationship between equanimity and compassion. Equanimity I our strong back-our courage to uphold ourselves and be present to illness and death. Compassion is our soft front-our ability to stay open to how things are and to stay connected to what is with love.
The words of Roshi Joan:
All too often our so–called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open…..
The place in your body where these two meet — strong back and soft front — is the brave, tender ground in which to root our caring deeply…
Strength grounded in love; the courage to risk being open; being brave and tender. Both-and.
In our culture, dominated by white supremacy and patriarchy, we are socialized into gender paradigms that support a strong back OR a soft front: men have strong backs and women have soft fronts. Neither gender is allowed to have both.
Like many women, I was socialized to the soft front paradigm, not so much to have a strong back. And yet, like many women, I was taught something different by the women who surrounded me. I have felt blessed for the presence of many women with strong backs and soft fronts in my life. My maternal grandmother who, in 1941, was divorced with a baby, and who made her way in the world with an 11th grade education and a strong will. My paternal grandmother who raised four boys in an Italian household well steeped in the culture of toxic masculinity. My mother, who had three children and a career when the doors of power were just beginning to open for women. They are who I am holding close on this Mother’s Day.
In history, we can find examples of those women who didn’t adopt the gender binary, who acted out of wholeness, who refused to be placed in a box. On this Mother’s Day, we might recall the history of this holiday as a shining example of this refusal.
In 1870, abolitionist, suffragist, and Unitarian, Julia Ward Howe, wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called for mothers across the world to unite to promote peace. This was in a time when married women had no rights to property or to their children, and many accepted the notion that society benefited when women remained uncorrupted by engagement in the public sphere. In 1873 Howe campaigned for a “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2.
Anna Jarvis was a Methodist businesswoman who created the first Mother’s Day celebration in 1908 to honor her social activist mother and all of the sacrifices that mothers made for their children. Ms. Jarvis worked hard to have Mother’s Day declared a national holiday, which President Woodrow Wilson did in 1914. Later in her life, Ms. Jarvis railed against the commercialization of this holiday, believing that the intent of celebrating the relationship between mothers and families had been lost.
These women were strong. They reached across the divisions of geography, culture, and beliefs. And their strength was grounded in love—love for their family, for their community, for their nation, and love for the world. They offer us inspiration for a strong back and soft front.
The brave, tender ground where we root our caring deeply is also told in stories of social justice movements, particularly those that use nonviolent resistance as their organizing paradigm. The idea and practice of nonviolent action was popularized by Gandhi as he mobilized his people to protest British rule in India. In his 1920 speech On Nonviolent Resistance, Gandhi outlined the two ways of countering injustice. The first is to fight violence with violence, a practice Gandhi suggests is adopted by supposedly strong people or nations that leads only to war, death and decline. Gandhi went on to say this:
Through the other method of combating injustice, we alone suffer the consequences of our mistakes, and the other side is wholly spared.
If you make laws to keep us suppressed in a wrongful manner and without taking us into confidence, these laws will merely adorn the statute books. We will never obey them.
Award us for what punishment you like, we will put up with it….Shower what sufferings you like upon us; we will calmly endure all and not hurt a hair of your body…. But so long as there is yet life in these our bones, we will never comply with your arbitrary laws.
Gandhi was criticized by those who equated nonviolence with passivity and who labeled him as weak. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted nonviolent action as the paradigm of his civil rights movement, he also called weak and passive by those who believed that violence had to be an option.
This tension between nonviolence and passivity was around long before Gandhi. Universalist minister, Adin Ballou, was an active abolitionist who, in 1846, struggled with the idea that nonviolence is passive. He synthesized and preached about what in his time were seen as two conflicting interpretations of the Gospel on nonviolence. One interpretation called for withdrawal from evil and the structures of evil in the name of witnessing the need for social change. The other interpretation called for active participation to promote social change. Ballou believed that moral intervention included action and engagement as well as withdrawal. He advocated nonviolent actions against evil, such as sit-ins and the underground Rail Road, as well as withdrawal from evil, using boycotts and walk-outs. He called for both-and.
What critics of nonviolence miss is that nonviolence resistance is not passive or weak, but quite active and strong, and in some models can be very confrontational. But those committed to nonviolence will not intentionally cause harm to others. This is where the strong back meets the soft front. Nonviolent resistance requires that we find the strength and courage to stand for our principles while remaining open to others, even those we disagree with. It requires that we remain grounded in that brave, tender place where love grows. It requires that we recognize that we are connected, even when it is hard.
For some, like Gandhi and King, this grounding has a religious or spiritual basis. As King said, “Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.”
In this time, as we are called in so many directions to protest injustice and stand with all who are oppressed, it is easy to become disheartened and weary. It is easy to lose hope and a vision of what might be. It is that grounding, our connection to that brave, tender place rooted in love that makes us able to be resilient and remain in the work of justice for the long haul.
So, how do we reconnect with our wholeness? For those of us with a strong back, how do we draw on our strength to be brave enough to risk having a front that is soft and open? For those of us with a soft front, how do we develop our strength to remain healthy and whole so that we can stay open?
I believe we can use spiritual practice to remember and restore our wholeness. A practice that helps me connect with that brave, tender place rooted in love is singing, the embodiment of strength and openness. The folks with me here on the chancel know this wisdom.
In order to sing well, you must be straight and strong, supporting your head, neck, chest and ribs in a way that allows air to flow through you. At the same time, you must also be soft, relaxed and open or else the sound will be constricted and small, and out of tune. And, the paradox is that it not only takes incredible balance between strength and openness to sing, it takes even more strength and softness to sing quietly. Those soft, sweet notes that the choir sang? They take amazing strength to release the breath softly and slowly, and extraordinary openness in order for the sound to be released at all and in tune. Strong back, soft front. For me, it is singing that helps me remember that place where strength meets openness, where courage meets compassion.
On April 9, Senator Tammy Duckworth became the first senator to give birth while in office. The junior senator from Illinois is an Asian-American woman and Iraqi war veteran who lost both legs when the helicopter she was flying was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. This retired Army veteran cannot possibly be called passive or weak.
On April 19, after a quick change to the rules to allow babies on the senate floor, Senator Duckworth, with her newborn daughter in her lap, voted against the president’s nominee to head NASA. (A nominee who has no scientific background and does not believe in climate change.)
Senator Duckworth is a woman who is embodies a strong back and soft front. She part of a long lineage of women who show up in the world as whole people and who are raising their children into a model of wholeness for people and for our nation.
In this time, may we commit ourselves to letting go of the binary models that force us to choose anything other than wholeness. May we nurture that place within us where our strong back and soft front meet, that brave, tender ground where we are deeply rooted in love. May we keep room in our hearts for the unimaginable, that place where binaries do not exist, where we are seen and see each other in our wholeness, for, in that place, all shall be Eden once again.
Will you join now me in that space where strong back and soft front meet? Please take a moment to center yourself in that brave, tender place of love and mystery.
Using your life as sacred text, I invite you to reflect on your experience of these past weeks. Silently name these times in your life.
When have you felt your back strong, your spine flexible and sturdy?
When have you felt your soft front, your heart open to hold all that is in the world?
When have you felt that brave, tender place where your strong back and soft front meet, where your caring is rooted deeply?
In the days ahead, we will all have choices to show up strong and soft, brave and vulnerable, grounded and compassionate.
May we ground ourselves in love, not fear.
May we strengthen our backs so we can risk a front that is soft and open.
In these opportunities to choose, may we find the strength and softness to show up in our wholeness. May we find the wholeness in ourselves and in others. And by our example, may we teach this wholeness to our children.
May this be so.
Amen.
Topics: Vision