Do Each Thing As If It Were Worship

[Note: Today’s guest blogger is Theresa Tensuan-Eli. Theresa faithfully joins the livestream of Spiritus’ Sunday 9:30 mass from Ardmore, PA.  She is a member of the Across the Miles cohort and the circle that maintains the Prayer Line, and teaches writing and advises students at Haverford College.  Theresa will also be facilitating a lenten program for us on Monday, March 31st called: Poetry, Prayer and Practice. You can register for that here. Thank you Theresa!]

My friend Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher, and community organizer who has worked with communities ranging from students and teachers at Placencia Elementary School in Los Angeles, to young adults in LGBTIQ communities, to folks contending with the effects of Long Covid.  Pato has a special gift for forging community among people who may be gathering for the first time, as well as for long-standing groups that may be working to address crises and conflicts within their circle, or who are trying to figure out how to work together most effectively in service of a shared cause.

Pato taught me that short, simple prompts are really wonderful ways of enabling participants in a circle to surface what is in their hearts. One extremely effective exercise that I’ve adopted from him is to ask people at the outset of a class (or another venture) to share “Hopes and Fears” for whatever lies ahead.  

I often do this as a “snowball” exercise where people write their hopes and fears on a half sheet of scrap paper, crumple the paper up in a ball, and toss it into the middle of the circle.  We each then grab one of the balls of paper, smooth it out, and read it aloud to the group.  It is sometimes easier for us to be open about a dream or concern if we can share it anonymously, and a great way of building group solidarity is to begin to literally as well as figuratively hold one another’s cares and concerns.

The prompts that Pato offers for “Hopes and Fears” are “What are you looking forward to?” and “What is making you feel tense or tight?”  People really get into that second prompt – it helps you to quickly identify whatever it is that is jamming you up or making you feel anxious. Hence, I love the invitation at the outset of each Mass at Spiritus to “drop your shoulders” – a reminder to let ourselves relax, and begin to let go of whatever may be blocking our ability to be fully present to the Spirit.

In today’s first reading from Jeremiah, the people who are being admonished for not listening to God are described as ones who have “not obeyed me nor paid heed. They have stiffened their necks and done worse than their fathers” (Jeremiah 7: 26).  I was curious about this call back to something that the ancestors had done wrong, and learned that this is a reference to Exodus: the Israelites are tired and thirsty and start quarrelling with Moses, berating him for leading them into the desert and putting them into a position where they fear that their children and livestock will die of thirst.

Here, I’ve always found myself on the side of the Israelites – it seems completely logical that you would petition your leader for what you simply need to live.  When I look at the Exodus passage a bit more closely, I realize that what is at issue is that, driven by their fear and anger, they’re about to stone Moses.  Moses – who must himself be terrified – turns to God, who gives him the miraculous ability to get water from a stone.

So now I’m rethinking this incident – seeing it as a story about a group of people who, wracked by fear, are starting to turn on one another.  And, Dear God, I can relate!  As the year has been unfolding, I have been in so many conversations in which the upshot has been “where are our leaders in this time of crisis?  Don’t they have some kind of plan?”  It is scary to be in a situation in which those to whom we usually turn for guidance may themselves be frozen with fear, and I understand that “deer in the headlights” feeling that comes from not knowing whether a decision will help or hurt the most vulnerable.

So I turn to a passage from Mab Segrest that resurfaced for me this morning. In her collection of essays Born to Belonging she writes of being part of a group of 40,000 women who gathered outside of Beijing in a forum that was running parallel to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.  This experience leads Segrest to a revelation: “Do your work and step back: the secret of wu wei, effortless action. This detachment is not the polar opposite of engagement, as perhaps I once suspected.  On the contrary, I have learned, such detachment allows for deeper engagement because I know the effects are not really up to me, although the work is.  Do each thing as if it were worship and the rest should more or less take care of itself” (227). 

Segrest’s words resonate with those of Audre Lorde who in her essay “The Transformation of Silence to Language and Action” writes:  “ I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?”  

Thus, I’m thinking of this as a time to remind ourselves of the work that we are called to do, and to do that work as prayerfully as possible in right relation to others who are doing their own work.  

Given all this, I am embracing Rev. Celie’s insight that one very “underappreciated antidote to anxiety is community.”  In caring for one another, and simply doing what we are called to do, we can move together in continuing to create the Beloved Community that can sustain us all.