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Perhaps you, like me, have seen this come across your social media feed:
Sounds so cool, doesn’t it? Well, the United States is one of those 50 countries, and a depot of the Human Library has been underway for some time here in the SF Bay Area. A friend and colleague in the UK gave me a heads-up that a friend of hers was moving to my area and that we should meet. She rightly predicted that we would really like each other. (All three of us are UUs.) What I didn’t know until we got together for a get-acquainted lunch was that she–the arrival, my new friend–was the new manager of the Human Library depot. I was very excited, and immediately asked how we could bring a Human Library event to UUCPA.
I expect that we’ll do that fairly soon, especially since our minister of religious education is as jazzed about it as I am. In the meantime, I am going to be a Book in the Human Library, this weekend, in San Rafael! It is on Saturday, December 2, 1-5 pm at Marin Ventures. Readers, for whom the Library is completely free, can have a 30-minute conversation with me about two aspects of my identity: being an atheist, and being a pansexual. I should say “or” rather than “and,” since trying to talk about both in the same 30-minute span would be a bit taxing. 😉
I am really looking forward to it, and I hope I have some good conversations. This is one of those activities that I didn’t particularly have on my list of sabbatical plans, but that fits beautifully with them. I have the spaciousness to devote an entire Saturday to something that doesn’t involve my family (something I avoid as much as possible when I’m working and Saturdays are our only family day). I’m having encounters that I imagine will teach me as much as they teach the Readers. And I’m learning firsthand about a ministry (my word, not the Human Library’s) that we at UUCPA can help offer to our community.
For the dates and locations of other Human Library events, follow the organization here.
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A new Ask Isabel is up! The letter writer is finding it hard to be thankful this year. Click on over to read what I suggested.
I didn’t realize until after I’d drawn this that the location has a name very similar to a name in our family, the branch that came to the US from Lebanon.
While the world weeps over the bloody religious conflict in the Middle East, the smaller conflicts that concern folks stateside might seem trivial in comparison. However, I believe that if we practice cross-religious dialogue in safer, easier settings like a good friendship, we can learn skills that can transfer to higher-stakes situations. Imagine a world where religion doesn’t divide us . . .
Today’s letter presents an opportunity to start small.
Ask Isabel: Two friends, two faiths
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There’s no avoiding it: as soon as I start posting drawings like this and the previous one, some people will evaluate them politically. Am I showing too many images of ___ and not enough of ___? What do I mean by giving attention to ___ instead of ___? Etc.
I can’t say these aren’t political. All I can say is that allowing my heart to spend time with people who have suffered because of this conflict feels like it is the right thing to do. And if anyone is counting beans, they should be aware that I’m not posting everything I’m drawing. Some feel too raw and some are just crappy drawings, but they’re helping my heart stay with the suffering.
With this drawing, I was trying to make every mark a meditation and a reminder to myself that within these white plastic bags are parts of the bodies of people who were recently alive and who died by violence. Every mark a breath, taking in the reality of things we can’t see.
Tuesdays are Ask Isabel days!
In today’s column, a teenager wonders how to negotiate the gap between praying parents and an atheist friend.
I hope you like it.
I was 40 before I heard the term “executive function,” when a parent at church said her child was getting some coaching in that area: the cluster of cognitive functions, such as working memory and emotional regulation, that make planning, problem-solving, and time management possible. Like many, probably most, people who got that far in life while regularly misplacing objects, forgetting any appointment that wasn’t written down and some that were, underestimating the time tasks would take, and overestimating the time I had in my day, I had a lot of shame and internalized criticism about these difficulties. In a shabby little corner of my mind, I even thought it was indulgent to consult a coach instead of just sucking it up and doing what most other people seemed to manage on their own.
Another ten years along, I had managed to shed a lot of that “just do it” nonsense. Around the same time, I considered that I might have ADHD; discovered that I didn’t tick the necessary diagnostic boxes; but also learned that a lot of the advice that ADHD-wise experts give was useful to me also. It seemed to fit the way I thought and the difficulties I had. (I distinguish between these experts and the people who just give supremely unhelpful advice like “Have you tried writing things down?,” the psychological equivalent of tech help that asks you if your computer is plugged in.) It occurred to me that if there were people who helped children and teens develop their executive functions, there might be coaches for adults, too. There are, and they do often work with people with ADHD–but they don’t care if you have the diagnosis. Presumably they have also noticed that the approaches that help folks with ADHD help a lot of us who live on some point of the spectrum between Diagnosably Neurodivergent and Textbook Neurotypical, if the latter exists.
The approach of sabbatical is a time to reflect: What would I like to do differently in my ministry, or do more, or do less? What do I want to learn during this time that could help me accomplish that change? One theme that emerged from my reflections was: I’d like it not to be quite so hard. Or rather, I’d like the hard parts of ministry to be the hard parts: staying present with people in times of grief and uncertainty. Crafting worship that is engaging and deep. Strategizing how to help a community adapt to cultural changes like a global pandemic, and respond courageously to threats to democracy. I wanted to be able to put more energy into those aspects of ministry, and not have it sapped by searching for files that were sitting right there yesterday, damn it or scrambling to meet a deadline I had forgotten about until it was upon me. I decided that sabbatical would be a good time to see whether some executive function coaching could make what was easy for some people easier for me. It sure didn’t feel like something I could squeeze in to my work week.
The only down side of getting my coaching during sabbatical was that maybe, lacking the daily influx of emails, meetings, etc., I would not have enough material to work with. No fear. Within a month I had plenty of leisure-time examples of executive dysfunction to analyze with a coach. I began meeting with Kelly in August. And it’s a profound relief to talk about these things with someone who understands “I wrote it on my to-do list, but then I was scared to look at my to-do list,” and who can help me come up with ways to overcome that fear: ways that actually work, not for other people but for me. Just like in sports, the coach can’t do the work for you, but a good one can help focus your attention on what will make the biggest difference between today’s training session and the next one.
I don’t have any illusions that I will be an organizational genius by January. These functions may always require particular attention to run smoothly. But I have some hope that they can run smoothly, most of the time, if I keep working on them–and that’s something I haven’t felt in many, many years.
I hope you’ll check out my new column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed
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Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
This is as done as it’s going to get–I think I’m better off starting from scratch if I want to improve it. But the making of it has been painful and beneficial. I am trying, over and over, to embrace my art as a spiritual practice and only secondarily concern myself with the physical artifact that results.
The subject is a child whose name I don’t know, who came to this Gaza hospital a couple of weeks ago when the refugee camp that is her home was bombed. Next to her gaze, and the so-adult expressiveness of her hands, it’s the little details of normal life that wring my heart (as normal as life in a refugee camp can be said to be). Someone helped pull that Minnie Mouse shirt over her head. Someone pulled her hair into a ponytail with that white elastic. Is that person’s blood on her shirt now? Is that person alive? Is she alive?–an ambulance just outside the hospital has been bombed since, and the lack of fuel is turning Al-Shifa into a “mass grave,” although a rumor that a group of Israeli doctors actually called for the hospital to be bombed seems to be sheer invention. (I found reports about it, but searching for the “Israeli news site” they claim to be citing, and the name of the group they claim is doing this, turns up nothing. “The truth is the first casualty of war”; read with care.) 11/7/23, ETA: I saw the same story with full citations here, thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace. At this writing, over 90 doctors have signed the letter. Utterly sickening.
I will never know her story. I just know that I hope neither I nor anyone I love ever has to look upon whatever horror her eyes are seeing.
Content warning: image of a grief-stricken child
It’s so hard to give my heart’s attention to what’s happening in Gaza and Israel: not to intellectualize, avoid, or take any of the other escape routes away from grief and despair, but just to be there with all of the feelings. I thought drawing some of the images that have haunted me might help. Like my brother-in-law John, on whose social media I saw it, I’ve been unable to forget this little girl, who was photographed at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, after Israel bombed the refugee camp where she lived. The photo is by Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times (“As Warnings of Crisis in Gaza Mount, Palestinians Struggle to Find Room for the Dead,” October 12, 2023). Drawing her feels like a prayer. I’m holding her in my heart the whole time, wishing her well, as if the point of the pencil were a hand gently touching her hand, smoothing back her hair. I wish it could be. I hope someone is caring for her that way.
This drawing is far from finished, but I wanted to share what I’m doing.
Expect to see more of these as I try to be fully present with the people whose images are passing before our eyes daily: parents carrying the wrapped bodies of their children, the horrifyingly small packages of body parts awaiting identification at a morgue, people wailing at funerals. I don’t expect to show anything gory, but they are emotionally grueling, so I’ll give content warnings.
Yesterday the fifth Ask Isabel column hit the email inboxes. It’s getting more attention: more subscribers, more readers, and the first Like and comment!
This week’s column asks whether God matters.
You can see all of the columns here, and of course, subscribe (it’s free and spam-free) and also submit a question if you are so moved.
I’m really enjoying delving into the many questions people have. Clearly, even for people who aren’t religious and don’t think much about spiritual matters, these issues make themselves felt: via the wider community, in conversations (and sometimes conflicts) with family and co-workers and friends and neighbors, in chance encounters, through memories of communities that were once important to them. It’s an education just to hear what people are thinking about.
Sermons in Stones 
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