Making the Most of a Wedding

Last week I attended the beautiful wedding of two close friends. It was their third. To each other. Within the span of one year!

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. They broke their wedding down into the several very different kinds of events that they are: civil contract, family union, celebration among friends, church blessing and had different occasions for each.

They did something similar to what my husband and I did for our own wedding, and witnessing it as a supporting observer helped me realize how well it works.

Passing on what they did, you can take it as advice or just curiosity, but everyone who attended these weddings said: “Wow, why don’t more people do it like this?!

1. Keep church and state separate, which helps keep the focus where it belongs.
Our friends went to City Hall on Friday, with just each other, for the civil recognition of their union as a marriage. It allowed them to concentrate on the significance and the obligations of the pledge they were making, without taking care of anyone else around them. 

Then, on Sunday, they had their marriage blessed in the context of the main liturgy, with the whole community gathered around them. The most powerful moment for me was when we all laid hands on them or on someone who could reach. Their marriage visibly hinged, not on their promises, but on God’s blessing made visible in the community pronouncing it.

2. Plan the kind of wedding you don’t have to have a rehearsal for.
By placing the blessing of their marriage in the context of the Sunday worship, they could basically just show up to church and receive the blessing. In fact, the preacher affirmed that it actually wasn’t all about them, but about all of us, that their commitment modeled to us our own call to live in the covenants of belong and support that we all have.

Then last week, several months later, when they gathered their widest circle of friends together in a brief reaffirmation of their vows and a boisterous party, it was uncomplicated enough that they didn’t even need a rehearsal. It was not a produced event for observers but a gathering of friends all the corners of their life who wanted to celebrate them. Again, echoing the Sunday blessing, that moment of gathering AROUND them and overwhelming them with our hands was palpably powerful.

3. Invest in a photo booth instead of a photographer. This was one of the coolest things I noticed at their party: while they had a friend with a decent digital camera jumping around getting the good shots, instead of hiring a professional photographer they brought in one of those four-pictures to a strip photo booths, with some props to make it hilarious, and someone standing by to paste the signed strips in an album. Voila! Instant candid, relaxed, personalized documentation of everyone there. 

I realize that this kind of wedding is not for everyone, but it’s actually a lot more traditional than the modern blowout. Weddings in many cultures even today last for days and happen in several concentric circles. At the heart of our friends’ wedding was the willingness to step back to first principles and ask “What’s it all for?” And then to ask: How can we best show in our ritual what we mean in our lives? That’s a good way when planning anything to get to the heart of the matter.

When Performance Becomes Listening Yesterday’s interpretation of the Passion Gospel by the Trinity Choir was the most arresting interpretation I have ever experienced, an instant indelible memory.

The technical aspects of what the choir did were impressive: the solos, duets, and full-choir parts were all completely improvised – the choir had no music, only text (the way the early monastics used to sing) - and one rehearsal to gel. This meant that they had to listen to one another intensely, in the moment, and they had to listen to what the text, and the moment itself, was telling them to do.

The result was riveting - the way certain words and phrases opened up to new interpretation, sung in a spiraling thin line, a forceful baritone blast, or augmented with edgy half-tone grace notes. I heard this story again for the first time.

I spoke with some of the singers afterward. Far from a simple “performance,” they had found themselves soulfully drawn deeper into the text. Two of the principal singers said they were sweating profusely from the concentration it took to listen so deeply to one another and to the emerging meaning. The moment that will remain burned in my memory was the interpretation of Jesus’ words “Take, eat, this is my body.” My whole world pivoted in that moment (a rare gift for the liturgist who plans worship). The singer said later that in rehearsal he had sung the lines lower, with more weight, but in the moment he could sense Jesus’ extreme vulnerability, and was led to a higher pitch. Those words as he sang them had such a plaintive, almost confessional quality. Their humanity came through so piercingly.

That’s the word: pierced. The passion reading pierced me this year. It could do that because it was piercing the choir in that moment, and they were clear and generous channels. But I wasn’t just getting the choir’s single interpretation; like a sermon preached from the pulpit, the people in the pew each hear a unique message, the sermon they need to hear. Everyone has to be listening for this to be able to happen.

These are precious moments in life, whether on the stage, in the pulpit, or over coffee, when “performer” and “listener” distinctions fall away, and each makes available their whole selves to this moment’s transformation. There is only listening, and then generous living.

It’s only Monday; we’ve got a lot of that ahead this week!

Palm Sunday is Ripe for Reflection

Click here for more images from Palm Sunday

I admit it, I’m becoming ambivalent about Palm Sunday.

For many years, I’ve felt uneasy at the quick switch from joyful Hosannas to “crucify him!” I recognize it as an all-too-human capacity, that fickleness of loyalty, but this year I’ve wondered at how to engage with the Palms procession as a liturgical event at all.

People are genuinely happy on Palm Sunday; doing the procession well creates a parade feeling that’s a little like Mardi Gras - joyful, public exuberance. However, in the scripture story the event is deeply ironic because of what will happen a few days later. And democratic westerners have a deeply ambivalent relationship to the notion of kingship, so the sentiment of king-making lends a further cross-current to the procession. To accurately represent the story and see its scope, the paraders have to stand a little apart from themselves and observe, not get too deeply engrossed in the moment.

When we were on pilgrimage in Jerusalem last year the procession made perfect sense in that context: the earliest accounts of Christians remembering the events of the Passion were recorded in the 4th century. Every site is a stone’s throw from every other, and they reflected as they traveled from site to site. They went to Bethany across the Kidron valley to pray, and then walked back into the city, naturally reading and singing about this surreal and foreboding final journey. Folks back home picked up the practice, and we have been processing with palms ever since.

But marching down Broadway, so much of that original layered resonance and reflection is lost, and so we appropriately lean into what is actually going on in that moment: exuberant public witness to our Christian presence in the city, a vivid signal that Holy Week is beginning. And we mount a GREAT procession - it is well-attended, the symbols are big and bold, and it becomes very interactive with the bystanders.

But my concern remains: if, as Easter People, we stand already and always on the other side of Easter Day, then how do we remember this day we call Palm Sunday? We can’t pretend to be an unreflecting crowd for a moment - and winking knowingly at the crowd’s fickle naivete undercuts the full-throated enthusiasm of the procession.

I don’t have an answer to my puzzle; I’m putting this all on the table because it raises the question that I think is the most important one generally for us to be asking as we come together to plan and engage in worship:

What is it that we think we are doing?

It’s a question of deep intention, deep reflection, and meaning finding/making. What do we intend by our action? Where do we intend for it to take us, and how will it shape us? Liturgy’s gift to us is its long and durable repetition - it ties us back into an old, rich evolving conversation. Its danger is the same: the repetition becomes unreflective. The doing of it becomes its own end.

Palm Sunday is one of those liturgies that is ripe for reflection, to investigate more deeply what it is we intend to be saying and meaning by what we are doing on this day. That reflection will lead to a fresh re-appropriation, and in come cases revision, of our practice.

In the meantime, we will continue to have the best Palm Sunday procession we can muster, and with eyes wide open, we will continue to discover new things every time we repeat this wide-ranging liturgy (this year we are improvising the music of the passion gospel).

This is the “dynamic durability” of liturgy that I so love - adding our voice to such an old conversation, and doing the hard work of discovering the meaning in it for ourselves so that others are led to a fresh engagement with God for themselves.

Ash Wednesday, Part 2

Last blog I talked about what it was like for me to be on the receiving end of the ashes - experiencing the blessing and release of mortality. But as a priest on the giving end of the ashes I have experienced that intense joy of Ash Wednesday a hundredfold, and at no time more intensely than while at Trinity, and while at Trinity at no time more intimately than this year, when we took the ashes from the pews to the streets.

Given Trinity's centrality in location and symbolic force downtown, we have for many years opened the doors from dawn till dusk and marked all who came with ashes - usually around 12,000 people. The range of people is amazing - all ages, ethnicities, even religions. They come. We mark. This symbol of mortality is not sectarian, it's universal. The experience of marking forehead after forehead, without pause, for an hour-long shift at a time is intense. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Remember. Remember. Remember. At least one person remembers after that shift: the one with the sooty thumb.

The intensification of intimacy hit me this year when we took the church to the people. As an experiment, we stood in cassocks with our ashes at the edge of St. Paul's Chapel churchyard, on the corner of Church St. And Vesey, during rush hour - arguably the busiest intersection in the city as the PATH train from New Jersey disgorges thousands of commuters every several minutes onto that street corner.

There was a steady stream of people asking for ashes, but unlike the people going inside the church, each of these penitents had just been surprised in the moment by the unexpected offer, made a split-second decision to cut through the crowd and to be watched by a teeming swarm of humanity as they made this ritual gesture.

All those firing synapses charged the air on the street corner, and each ash cross felt electric. Over and over again: standing 18 inches away from a total stranger, looking into their eyes, placing a hand on their head, and pronouncing those words of doom and release, after which their face often brightened with a smile, a Thank You or Amen, and another direct glance as they melted back into the crowd.

Ash Wednesday may sound in theory like a real downer of a day, but I find it just the opposite: that intimacy of connecting with strangers in a city were people are experts at defensiveness and anonymity, and that unvarnished truth-telling about the human condition, the brightening countenance - a little moment of transcendence. It is little moments like these that help us all truly live. Live even now beyond the shadow of death, which is what this day and this season, and the great Easter feast for which we are preparing, is all about.

Remember That You Are Dust

Back in college, I entered an Episcopal church for the first time, and I received ashes for the first time, and the reality that my life was brief and ephemeral got through to me for the first time.

That moment is still vivid with me, because the experience of kneeling at that rail and feeling those gritty ashes scraped across my forehead and falling on my eyelashes was strangely one of overwhelming relief and release.

The young think they are immortal - that is one of the beauties of youth, but it is one of the great anxieties as well. With all that potential there is the need to prove oneself. How will that potential of a whole life ahead be realized in me? What great thing am I called to do? What path should I choose that will lead me to the rainbow's gold? As one of my favorite songwriters, Emily Saliers, writes: "You can stand there and agonize 'til your agony's your heaviest load."

Those ashes were not speak cynically to me; they did not say 'Why bother - it's all going to end in dust anyway.' Instead they were a deeply truthful reminder: 'You a a part of a great chain of being. This life is a breath in, and a breath out; that is all. Your name IS written in sand.'

I heard further: 'Therefore the weight of the world does NOT hang on your shoulders, so you are released to pay attention to how much of Life is Now. And in your one breath, your one life, you are invited to contribute to what is around you.

The meaning of those ashes turned a key of release from the overdramatizing of my one life's indelible and enduring import, and opened a door of invitation into my life's opportunity in the moment to offer my breath and being.

I confess: I forget to use that key most of the time. And that is why I love Lent, and especially love Ash Wednesday. It reminds me of that key, it cuts through the distractions I have chased after and it contradicts everything every advertising agency has been telling me all year long.

Now, many years after those first ashes, my knee hurts when the weather changes and my L4/L5 disk complains for days if I get out of bed wrong. My path till now has been more circuitous than I could have imagined, and richer than I could have believed. And my guess is, so has yours.

Digging deep into this reminder of the release and invitation of our mortality is one of the best ways I know to prepare for the Easter feast, which reminds us that some part of us already lives, even now, beyond death's grasp. Holding those two truths together is a whole life's work.

Happy Lent.

Daniel

Powered by Joy

Every Sunday we dance in the liturgy at St. Paul’s Chapel – a simple and ancient Greek/Roman step that takes us up to the altar for communion.  The congregation – largely made up of first-time visitors - sometimes unexpectedly breaks into applause upon reaching the altar, a spontaneous expression of joy for having done something so connected and unexpected and strangely appropriate in church. 

This past week we took that up a notch. Last Sunday night St. Paul’s was packed with 300 exuberant people, with their hands in the air, dancing for joy.

A posse of young dancers from Brooklyn have been making a film this past year called Girl Walk//All Day that has been released in 6-minute chapters on the Gothamist website.  It has just been assembled as a whole and they head out on tour next week. There are no words, only a soundtrack provided by the group Girl Talk, and the storyline follows these dancers as they dance through the streets, shops, parks (and even Yankee Stadium) of New York City, inviting people to dance with them, simply for the joy of being alive. 

The pleasure and poignancy of the film arises both in the exuberance of the street dancing, and in how passersby interact, or don't.  A few people dare to smile at the dancers, and a couple even dare to shuffle their feet with them.  But given that this is New York, most people look straight through the spectacle as if it didn’t exist, or look away, or hunker down on their sandwich or newspaper, or step away warily from the dancers, as if they were contagious (as in fact they are).  The film is a wonderful piece of popular artistry that is going viral around the world.  It’s pure joy.

My colleague Emily had the brilliant idea to invite this joy to church – to open with an hour of instructed dance (think amped up line-dancing), then a screening of the film, followed by a social hour.  The producer and dancers eagerly accepted, and the dream became real. 

About 200 folks turned up for the class – Nearly all had never been to St. Paul’s before – most probably had not been to church since childhood if at all. 

John, one of the main characters in the film (“The Creep”), taught some wonderful freestyle moves. The heart of his teaching was easy participation and unedited joy, the soul’s language spoken through the body. 

The film gathered even more people into the room, about 300, many of whom just kept dancing along with the story on the screen.  The air was electric with a kind of childlike freedom.   Even though I was nursing a cold, I found my feet moving irresistibly. There's something about watching Joy happen around you that inspires more of it - and conversely, as the film’s footage showed, that grim determination to be somber and focused and even unhappy has a tremendous grip when it is adopted by the masses. 

In the social time that unfolded afterwards, folks were effusively thankful, and a little baffled.  Every interaction I had with this young crowd were versions of: “How did you get permission to do this?” “I never thought churches could be places where this sort of thing could happen.” “If I told my parents I was dancing in church they would never believe me – both that I had gone to church, and that I could dance there.”  “This sure isn’t what I grew up with.”  “What are you going to do next?”  One young reporter from Columbia asked me: “How long have you been doing things like this here?” “Oh, about 300 years,” I answered. 

Of course it was a quip in the moment, but I think it’s true.  I look over in the corner at George Washington’s pew and at the original painting of the Great Seal of the United States hanging above it, and I think there is probably something in this place’s DNA that says “I don’t know; let’s try it!” – a daring that is willing to explore new paths to let something passionate out of the box.  Trinity might have a venerable reputation, but that ballast allows for creativity and risk

I’ve seen archival photos from the 70’s: a stage set up in front of Trinity Church with the Broadway cast of Godspell, and Wall Street packed as far as the eye could see: 

Want more images of music and the arts in the late 1960s? Click here.

It’s not just the DNA of Trinity; it’s somewhere in the blood of every church – just read the Book of Acts.  One new risky experiment after the next, based on the idea that God was doing something new in the world, fueled by individual hearts on fire, collected into community.

 What is next for St. Paul’s and Trinity on this score?  I don’t know. That’s part of the fun of it; it’s like the film’s dance – apparently freestyle but based on deep, ancient,  and durable patterns - and powered by joy.  Whatever it is, I know we will discover it organically, and collectively, and that the spark will probably come from an unexpected corner, and that someone will probably say, “I don’t know; let’s try it and see!” 

For a gallery of photos from the event click here. 

To see the film Girl Walk//All Day, click here. 
(note: soundtrack contains profanity)

 

Unstoppable Song

The MLK holiday has been around long enough that for many of us it may pass without reflection, like Memorial Day or Labor Day. I was expecting another holiday weekend like that: we would have a special preacher in church, sing We Shall Overcome, and sleep in on Monday.

So I decided to step in a little deeper this year, and I watched a documentary last night: Soundtrack for a Revolution. It had a transformative effect on how I am remembering this anniversary, which might make it for me the most important national holiday I celebrate this year.

The documentary looked at the whole arc of Martin’s vocation as a movement leader not from the top but from the bottom: from the perspective of the grassroots music that brought people together, and its power to unite them in participative community - literally in one voice.

When Martin and the early movement leaders embraced Gandhi’s principles of non-violence, music immediately took a key role - slave songs, spirituals, Methodist hymns, made-up words to popular ditties - all these came together to forge something indestructible. One after another, a theme was articulated in various ways: “They could take our lives, but they couldn’t take our song. Once we discovered that, we discovered our freedom.”

Steven Mithin in his book The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body suggests that early humans very likely sang before we spoke. Song is that deep in us. In an iPod generation we have largely lost that skill and awareness. I’d like to think that it doesn’t require an extreme crisis to bring that awareness back; maybe it could be enough to reflect on this striking and important liberating moment in our recent past, and pay attention to the deep hunger for community that so many people are currently starving for.

Very dear to my heart is a project I have worked on with for the past six years with a group of musicians and religious leaders. It’s called Music that Makes Community, a grassroots workshop-based approach to helping people rediscover their collective voice in song, and the power of that discovery to transform other parts of their communal life. I have seen over and over again how that simple practice of making music together with nothing or little more than the human voice creates an immediate soulfulness that seems almost magic, though it is our birthright.

“Mic check… Mic check…” is the now familiar opening call of the OWS protesters/organizers who use an interesting and effective style of message repetition to create a collective focus in a crowd: the leader does not rely on a speaker system, but instead shouts his message to the crowd, and those who can hear repeat it back phrase by phrase. A much larger crowd gets informed, and every repeater gets a double reinforcement of the message. Maybe this is a new generation’s early discovery of what the civil rights protesters learned so well: Common purpose, common voice, and common song is unstoppable.

There is much more for us all to discover and remember about collective soul and collective action. As someone who goes to church every Sunday where we sing our way through the whole service, I know we have a good laboratory to work on it! Keep singing!

To learn more about the Soundtrack for a Revolution documentary go to soundtrackforarevolutionfilm.com

To learn more about Music that Makes Community project visit allsaintscompany.org

And to hear a great MLK day sermon preached at Trinity yesterday visit www.trinitywallstreet.org/webcasts/videos/sermons/guests/holy-eucharist-11

What We Are Called to Do

Since it started, I have felt the pulse of the Occupy Wall Street movement from close proximity. Now at the three-month anniversary, here’s my take on what’s happening on the ground.

The early days of any movement are first vivid and then obscure. The first couple of months here were a euphoric blend of high energy and creative output for many. This past month, post-Zucotti Park, has been one of re-visioning, with the young movement trying on different voices and different plans of action as it seeks to move forward.

Some of the principal organizers have focused the substantial money they are raising on rented indoor office space to advance the movement. Many of those who had been attracted by the camp’s utopian promise took what they had gained back home with them, to let their self-transformation catalyze others. And one wing of the protest has begun speaking of the occupation of private property as an act of prophetic liberation, including a square of private land owned by Trinity, a mile north of Wall Street.

Trinity got engaged in pastoral and material support of the movement from the start, and our involvement was not just as an unaffected donor: surprising to many, the Trinity congregation is not comprised of financial types, but rather is a socially and racially diverse group struggling through economic hard times, job loss, layoff, etc. Along with many of the OWS participants, we are wrestling with, what “movement” really means - how to move a vision forward - around obstacles, with incredible divergence of opinion and agendas, and without a clear action plan yet formed. It’s pretty gritty and non-utopian, but it feels truthful and real.

I have been so grateful to have witnessed the painful and heroic struggle of the OWS General Assembly’s spokes-council and other sub-groups (which continue to meet in our parish hall) as they try to forge an alternative way of being community and making decisions together. And I am weekly blown away by the stories coming out of Charlotte’s Place, our neighborhood community center. Since the first days of OWS, it has been a hive of activity, serving up to 1,000 guests per week. Since the clearing of Zuccotti Park the balance has shifted toward caring for those who were drawn to the movement but have felt left behind, many without work or any place of belonging. The stories of personal triumph, struggle, and grace are mostly private but very poignant, and I feel like I’m often seeing the Light breaking through unexpectedly in hidden, daily ways.

In the coming weeks we’ll be convening a series of forums with noted teachers and activists on many of the issues raised by the OWS movement, as a way to increase understanding. We are redoubling our support of job-creation initiatives in the city, trying to create a model that can be replicated by others. And of course, Charlotte’s Place continues to be open to all.

To that end, an on-the-ground practical pitch: The gospel invitation to people who were wondering what Jesus was really up to was: “Come and See.” That’s the best way to discover more about what is happening at Trinity during these extraordinary days. If you’re within reach, consider coming in to help; if you’re far away, pray for us and for all who are finding their way here.

Movement is a hopeful word for me; it signifies energy, growth, and change. Our preaching theme this Advent is “Light Breaks” - it breaks into a broken world, and it’s definitely broken into our lives here, through all the points of view and all the disturbance of these last three chaotic months of civil activism on Wall Street. I am hopeful that the OWS Movement will continue to move, to grow into its deepest prophetic message of inclusion, where all of us embrace our responsibly to create the world we share together. 

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street at http://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt

A Big Enough Tent for Everyone

The Episcopal / Anglican Church has always been a big tent. Going back to the 16th century, we have a long history of bridging wide divides - Catholic and Protestant, rulers and working class, and in more modern times gay and straight, African theological context and North American theological context, inter-religious dialog. We are great conversationalists. At the heart of that big tent approach is a theology of prayer. If the people pray honestly together, they can live together. So we convene people together, in conversation and in prayer.

As anyone who has tried to enter conversation between conflicted parties knows: it is a lot harder to stay in conversation than it is to square off and take sides. Taking sides gives us the satisfaction of being right, but entering a conversation gives us only a guarantee that we will be changed if we are really open, which is scary and threatening and usually painful; no wonder so few people do it. Conversation is at the heart of Conversion.

The OWS Protests breaking out across the planet are symptoms -- they point to something toxic in the system that needs rebalancing. A good doctor is always thinking of the Whole, and always thinking beyond the symptom.

Living locally to OWS, I have the great privilege of seeing these little moments within the symptoms of a drive toward wholeness, of conversation and of conversion happening in the cracks of all the craziness: Our neighborhood center, Charlotte’s Place, because of its proximity and open door policy, has become a de facto rest stop for the protest organizers; a place to check email, to use the facilities, to tell their story to someone who will listen, to plan and organize. This last week one of our team noticed a couple police officers at one of the tables, not policing but resting, filling out reports while around them kids checked their email and talked about political theory. When one of the protest organizers heard of their presence he said “Yes! Sweet. - this is what we need more of.”

At the Sunday Eucharist this past week, I came down the line with Communion and handed it to a couple officers standing there with tears in their eyes. Several more down the row I encountered one of the protest organizers. Her eyes were wet as well. And then mine were too.

Last week I talked with a consultant friend of mine who advises the largest financial groups in the nation. He recounted that the CEO of one of them, when grilled by his board about the protest, said flatly, “Listen, they have a point. We’d better pay attention.” It takes a generous and courageous heart to risk that kind of conversation, on every side. It is the hardest work, and the best. And it is the only thing that in the end can convert us, which is something that we all need.

Yesterday I talked with my favorite OWS protester, who carries a colorful sign listing the Fruits of the Spirit the Apostle Paul lists in Galations. He said that the size of the tent is a big topic even in Zucotti Park. As homeless people arrive and try to find a place in the group, there is a widening divide between those who think that the homeless are “undeserving” of the supply of donated raingear and mittens, and those who think that if the movement can’t live out its values in the park itself, then how do they advocate with authenticity the need to build a better society? The protesters are expanding how they think about the 99 and one percent.

Pulling in the one percent, whether at the top or the bottom, is the hard work. Being in the midst of how that happens, spiritually, soulfully, corporeally, is exhausting and exhilarating work. Ultimately it’s the Spirit’s work, who is bringing a lively thing into being through this very messy and very important conversation.

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street athttp://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt

Occupy Everything!

The Occupy Wall Street protest has just rolled through its one-month anniversary, and this past week at Trinity Church’s neighborhood center, Charlotte’s Place, Trinity convened a panel of Zucotti Park’s resident organizers. They were self-described "punk kids" who offered a fascinating view into the month-old collective mind of the park-dwelling community.

The first thing I noticed was that the speakers weren’t referring to a protest, they were referring to a movement. And when asked point blank what they wanted to see happen because of what they were doing in the park, their answers were as diffuse and universal as communitarians from the 1960s: Peace. Harmony. Justice. Courageous Community Values.

But from the outset they used another word that intrigued me: Responsibility: They said they were trying to be responsive to what’s happening in the world, that they recognize that a powerful surge is taking place. They feel responsible to give voice to that.

As nebulous as that might sound at first, they spoke about it not as theory, but as practice. The organizers become most animated when they talked about what they were discovering about the daily building of a working community: how decisions were made, how to feed and clean up after hundreds of residents, how they were learning to deal with cranky, mean signs and their creators in the midst of a diligently uncensored community. Their makeshift village is impressive: the kitchen filters its gray water through charcoal, the lending library is better than many in small towns, and the daily General Assembly works on a 9/10th voting consensus.

They acknowledged that this was incredibly hard work, but they see their makeshift village, and all the others around the world that are springing up, as incubators in real time of civic awareness and duty. They were as excited about living inside the culture they were creating as they were about its effect on the wider world. 

Their theme was consistently about moving from a sense of isolation and powerlessness to one of agency and connection to deepest purpose. They want to make a space where anyone with a sign and a message to share can feel that their voice matters and can be heard.

They talked about how their investment in the real-time on-the-ground lives of others and in the civic discourse has changed them forever, has made them feel part of something in a real, direct, and breathing way. One protestor put it bluntly: “I was watching this on the TV, and decided to turn it off and come down here to the park, and I discovered it’s a lot more fun to create something together. If they shut down this movement tomorrow it would have already changed my life.”

A protest can only happen because a deeper set of values are surfacing that run counter to some toxic prevailing norm, and this deeper Yes! seems to be taking shape slowly. Near the end of the forum, one member of the panel blurted out: “Really, this is not about occupying Wall Street; It’s about occupying everything!” He explained how the movement to him is about showing up for your life rather than abdicating, about being an agent instead of a victim, about getting involved rather than waiting for a “them” to take care of it.

Occupy Everything might be the best synthesis I’ve heard yet of the possibility that is germinating in the compost of this gathering. It should not be surprising that the protest signs talk about everything under the sun, because this greater Yes undergirds them all. At the end of the day the signs all seem to say the same thing; I am a subject, not an object to be polled and purchased and traded. I am not a commodity. The 99 percent slogan floating around Wall Street implies that in the end, we can only flourish collectively. It’s not utopian, or right wing, or libertarian to say that the more we take personal and collective responsibility for our civic life, the less “governing” - taming the selfish beast - needs to happen.

Whatever happens on Wall Street in the next month, “Occupy Everything” is my great takeaway of what this now-global wake-up call is, or can be. It’s more like a mantra, said to and for the self, and then lived out into the world one day at a time.

I’m going to start praying it regularly, and see where it takes me.

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street athttp://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt