Daniel J. Siegel was inspired to use his round coffee table as inspiration for the Wheel of Awaremess. even though his coffee table doesn’t have a hub or spokes. If it had been my metaphor, I would have put the wheel in motion, taking that load down the road. (My thing is not acronyms but rhymes and alliteration.) I suspect this man is secure enough to take a bit of teasing, but it is serious on my part to say that line of thought, intriguing as it is, caters to the people sitting around that coffee table. (I won’t take off on the coffee.) It is a kind of thought that I used to love in the days when I had the time and money to go to workshops.
My own symbol is quite different: a doorknob. Not a nice one, but an old white porcelain doorknob that I rescued from a pile of wreckage left from a house that had been bulldozed. I still have it. There are two stories.
One is the acquisition story. My parents were taking me back to Portland after I graduated from NU. I was devastated and wept hard. Then sulked in the back seat with my bare feet sticking out the window in the hot wind until we got to Browning. When we pulled into the parking of the Museum of the Plains Indian, I got out, stood my unshod feet in the circle of bronze imprints of Blackfeet who had shared sign language at a Thirties conference, and said, “Just throw out my luggage. I’m not going any farther.”
The gift shop clerk directed me to the principal, Tom McKeown, who was catching bait in Willow Creek which runs behind the museum. When I waded out in the marshy grass to talk to him, a blue heron flew up and slowly wing-rowed up the creek. I may have added this to the story later. I've told it many times.
When earlier we had stopped halfway, putting up the tent trailer that my grandfather had invented, I went poking around in debris and found the doorknob. It wasn’t easy to put up the Kozy Kamp tent part because the trailer part was packed with whiskey boxes of my books. My father had been amazed when I just went into the Evanston liquor store and asked for boxes which are the right size and strength for books. He thought alcohol was the devil incarnate. His mother’s brother died of alcoholism.
The symbolism of the doorknob was about the door part, though I can be a bit of a knob. Someone later remarked that “some people are like doors.” They meant opening ways into other constructions of the world. For me, it also has come to mean access to the liminal space defined by Victor Turner, a virtual place both protected and exposed to new meaning.
So I carried this doorknob along into my ministry. In Seattle I was asked to deliver the keynote speech for a conference of religious feminists where Starhawk was the main speaker. My speech was about socks, real ones, homemade, as a metaphor for constructing meaning. It was roundly condemned on grounds that:
1. A keynote implies that someone has the key, which is a sign of hierarchy and unnecessary experts, like clergy.
2. The event was on Friday, the traditional beginning of the Jewish sabbath, but I was not Jewish. (They assumed I was Christian, not picking up on the Unitarian aspect.)
3. I was chosen by the organizers without participation from women everywhere.
At some point Starhawk asked us to put on an altar the things we really treasured. She was aiming at cosmetics but I put my doorknob there. In those days I was too intense to be guarded. My doorknob and my “preaching lipstick” — L’Oreal, very expensive, red-gold — both disappeared. I hurt that they were gone, but thought this level of sacrifice was warranted.
At the next break, a woman brought me back my doorknob. “I figured it was important to you,” she said, which meant she had been paying close attention. I didn’t know her. She was taking care of me.
The keynote about socks became the lead narrative in a collection the Edmonton, Alberta, Unitarian congregation published of my “sermons.” “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke.” The idea of the series was reading the land, especially the high prairie where both Edmonton and Browning are located.
Fine thoughts for conferences, workshops and retreats are all very well and can earn a living for eloquent people with high aspirations, because those with the time and money will pay for them. But they don’t address the other people, the ones living with violence and murder or the ones who can barely stay alive because of hunger and exposure.
The Religious Right, I hear, is advocating firing squads for those prisoners Trump wants killed before he leaves because he believes it will please those full of vengeance. Before there were guns, the religious advocated burning at the stake and other tortures. One political group recently rolled out a guillotine. Kind thoughts about compassion while sharing a coffee table have nothing to do with this aspect. What does?
Do we bring up the wagon wheel used as a frame to bind a man for a flogging? Being “broken on the wheel”? How do we think of punishment except as a hell? How do we trust people to behave if we don’t punish them? And now we know what happens if evil people go unpunished.
Once as clergy I attended a peace workshop where the speaker elaborated on the concept of “Father”, Abba the protector. He spoke of the little kid on the knees of her daddy, secure in his lap. In the question period I asked how this fit for the child who had been molested by the father. He froze for a minute. Then he said, “You don’t play fair.” In other words, we were gaming, tricking by omission. At least he didn’t claim Satan, letting the Papa off the hook. He just didn’t have any consciousness of how wrong things can go. Everything was going well for him. His circle was only for his kind.
But the bulldozer can come to anyone, any time. What does religion or even spirituality say to that?
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