Guilt -> Grief -> Gratitude

The privilege question.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I hear from people fairly often that their interactions with me, this newsletter and the Farm make them feel guilty.  A neighbor might say to me, “I feel like I’m taking from you when I come over there.”  Or, an email arrives saying, “I feel like such a consumer every time I read the newsletter.”  Or, more cautiously and candidly, “Sometimes I feel bad about myself when I’m around you, Adam.” 

My encounters with guilt arrive most often when I visit nonhumans in the woods.  Guilt mixed with envy.  All they have to do is be themselves alongside their neighbors, who also seem to know how to be themselves, and, without sitting through hours of consensus meetings or spending years studying nonviolent communication, they just make a healthy forest. 

I often feel like a consumer when I’m in the woods praying.  I feel like I’m on the take every time I go.  But they keep encouraging me to stop feeling bad about myself. 

“Alive, today, I breathe in so much beauty, and I long to remember how to breathe beauty back out,” I say before I ask how I can be of greatest service.  It’s a simple prayer for an ecological function, one I’ve spoken aloud daily for many years now.  In the wake of that question, the long moments of listening are never silent.  It’s not that I keep talking.  I don’t.  Rather, these forgetful ears find a tiny crack in the way things are and a little bit of my awareness slips through.  On a good day, at least. 

When I say “I love you” to someone for the first time I usually explain what I mean by those words.  It’s not that I get a warm fuzzy in your presence.  I’m telling you that there is nothing you could do that would make you unlovable to me.  Your behavior might confuse or anger me, and I might draw boundaries, but loving includes learning and forgiving, and that’s what I’m signing on for with you.  Saying “I love you” isn’t a feeling.  It’s a practice.  A discipline.  A threshold.

I learned how to say that in the woods during one of those long moments of listening.  One of those not-so-silent moments of realizing that I’d already been forgiven and I was welcome to return home any time.

So many essential conversations will only become possible once we remember that our capacity for belonging isn’t actually as threadbare as we have allowed ourselves to believe.  So much of the work that needs doing will become possible only by seeing ourselves as worthy of forgiveness.  May that it be so for the next few minutes while I invite you to press your ear to the crack with me.

Sam and I are sitting at the front of a lecture hall at a large urban university.  We have turned off the glowing digital projector, rolled up the screen, and written in dry erase marker the conference theme followed by our two alternative phrasings:

Food is a human right.

Food is a gift with which humans have been entrusted.

Food grants humans a responsibility to feed one another.

The conference brochure lists at least ten other talks offered in other rooms during our time slot, so I’ve prepared myself for the possibility that no one will actually join us.  By five after, a dozen or so brave souls have picked our workshop titled:  Feeding One Another Without Markets—Neighboring Beyond the Human. 

We had seven hours in the car to prepare for the talk and it seemed that all roads led to gratitude.  In fact, traveling with only printed directions and paper maps offered us an opportunity to practice some of what we were going to talk about; we took several wrong turns, adding hours to the trip. 

Once gratitude has been reduced to a spoken laundry list of the things that worked out for us today, it might need a different name.  When I say “I’m grateful” within earshot of the Givers of Life what I mean is that there are no cards I could be dealt that would make me ungrateful for the simple gift of having breath today.  Saying I’m grateful isn’t a feeling.  It is a practice.  A discipline.  A threshold.

As I’m waiting to see if a few more folks will show up, a story comes flooding back to me, one I read in a book some years prior—around the time I started praying in the woods.   The story has a sort of barber shop mirror quality to it.  The author Stephen Jenkinson, himself a practiced storyteller, recounts sitting at the feet of a master teller named Martin Prechtel.  Martin lived for decades in a Mayan village before he was forced to return to the US.  He was born American, adopted into a remote village at seventeen, then ejected back into modernity.  Stephen’s book Die Wise, might also be called “How could we learn to live gratefully within a market society fueled by guilt and grievance?” 

In the story, the man named Martin says to the assembled audience of Americans and Canadians, “It’s very strange where you come from…it seems to me that where you come from everybody wakes up every day expecting to live.”  As the story washes over me, I wonder if “food is a human right” is code for “life is a human right.” 

I look out at our small audience and notice the presence of three African-American women.  I wonder how voluntary impoverishment will sound to them as it rolls off my tongue.  So, after Sam and I work through our introductions, I decide to address the privilege question directly.  “How can two European-American men raised in upper-middle class families and handed keys to the castle even begin talking about gratitude?”  I offer my alternative definition of privilege: a measure of insulation from one’s consequence in the world.  As our consequence comes slipping in through the cracks in the house of modernity—maybe in the form of a report describing our ecological complicity or the wretched working conditions in the factories that produce our shoes—what will we do with our feelings of guilt?  What will we do when we can no longer turn away from the dent in the world with our names on it?  By “our names” I mean Sam and Adam. 

Privilege begets guilt, if we let it in.  When guilt turns away from the easy rest stop of grievance, it will eventually deepen into grief, which then opens a doorway into gratitude.  This grief-informed gratitude doesn’t sound like a laundry list of the things that have worked out for us—almost the opposite.  This kind of gratitude says, “I’ve been granted a degree of fortune I didn’t choose.  Today I will ask how to levy that fortune to make things work out for others.”  This kind of gratitude puts a little bit less on its plate to keep others from starving.  In our time, some of those others are humans.  Many are nonhumans.  From Die Wise:

In cultures where food is not plentiful it is precious…A small meal in a bowl carries the immense story of its growing or hunting, the whole sweeping saga of how the seed or animal came to the people, all the times that the same food has been eaten in the same way as now, joining those at the frugal feast with all those who did so before. 

Ivan Illich wrote in The Right to Useful Unemployment:

All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased. In good times, most families got most of their nutrition from what they grew or acquired in a network of gift relationships.

“Food as a human right” might also be code for, “every human has a right to be liberated from ecological and neighborly entanglement by having enough money to buy all the food they desire from the grocery store.” 

By the time Sam and I get to the end of our talk, I still have no idea how our stories and provocations have been heard by the folks in the room.  Sam invites them to sit quietly for a couple of minutes to gather their griefs, longings and questions before we begin the discussion.  The first person to speak says “Privilege to guilt to grief to gratitude.  You’ve said things that I’ve been thinking but without having words for them.”

Then one of the African American women begins.  “When I think about gratitude I think about the alternatives,” she says.  “I could have woken up crippled or sick.  Instead, here I am in this room with y’all talking about gratitude.  Gratitude is going to look a bit different for each of us.  As a black woman I have some days where I am bowled over by the fact that I didn’t get hassled by the cops.  On those days I also remember that I might not have woken up at all.  Thanks for beginning the conversation.”

So many essential conversations will only become possible if we can remember that our capacity for belonging isn’t actually as threadbare as we have allowed ourselves to believe. 

So much of the work that needs doing will become possible if we can see ourselves as worthy of forgiveness. 

Stephen writes, “Waking up every day expecting to live is how people who hold life at arm’s length do so.”  When I say “I’m grateful to be alive,” I mean that there is no aspect of being alive that I will make unlovable to me.  It’s about as far from a feeling as you can get.  And let me tell you, it is no small task to walk through one’s days trying to live this one out.  But this blue birdsong world patiently awaits our return, and seems more than willing to offer us repeated, gentle reminders. 

Thank you for listening with me for a while.

In gratitude,

Adam