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COVID-19 as spiritual moment, part 1

“We are in uncharted territory.” That’s a statement I’ve heard and read many times in the last few weeks, and it’s true.

My husband and I once unintentionally sailed through uncharted waters. We actually had a chart, but recent storms had shifted the channel (deep passageway) and we ran aground. It was unexpected. It was disorienting. It was a bit frightening because we no longer knew the parameters of our safety.

The entire world has been thrust into an unexpected situation that is disorienting and sometimes frightening as we face a brand new virus.

What could be spiritual about a virus? Probably nothing. Not everything that touches our spiritual nature does so positively. But any moment in which we are engaged encompasses spiritual elements.

This blog begins a three-part series to explore the personal, community, and public/political intersections between coronavirus and spirituality. I hope you’ll enter the conversation and comment with your own discoveries and impressions.

The personal

Around the globe, many people’s lives have been upended by this pandemic.

The number of sickened and dead is still climbing. Thousands (maybe millions) have lost their jobs or are in fear of that eventuality. Others have found their jobs maximized in terms of hours or risk, or both. Schools have closed, visits to the ill have been limited, businesses and faith gathering spaces have been shuttered for the time being, distancing is encouraged or mandated. So much has changed, and part of the uncertainty is not knowing how long those changes will remain in place or if they may even be intensified.

In all of this, we need to care for each other and for our communities. In order to do that, we have to pay attention to what’s going on within ourselves. Like the airplane instruction that reminds us to put on our own oxygen masks before assisting someone else, self-care is an essential element in caring for other people. We should not be selfish (more about that in part two), but wealso remember that the health of our own bodies, minds, and spirits contributes to the health of the bodies, minds, and spirits of those around us.

Here are a few general principles about self-care (physical, mental, and spiritual – all of which are interconnected and inseparable) during a time of crisis.

  • Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Are you angry? Afraid? Bored? Anxious? At the end of your patience? Hopeful? Frustrated? Faithless? Grieving? Relieved that you and your loved ones are healthy? A mix of emotions is normal. Don’t repress them.
  • While acknowledging and paying attention to even the most negative emotions, lean on the more positive ones where you can. For me, gratitude is always a movement toward the healthy. I try to keep a mental list of the things and people for which I’m grateful, and I access that list when darker times and emotions threaten. During these times, I keep adding to my list: people who are working so hard for all of us to keep us healthy, or fed, or our utilities working; basics like clean water and shelter. Oh, and toilet paper.
  • Seek help when you need it. Are you being overwhelmed by depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear? Contact a therapist; many of them are working online or by phone to help people just like you.
  • Exercise compassion toward yourself and others. This will help to calm you.
  • Limit your exposure to constant news sources, while staying abreast of what’s important and essential.
  • Stay as physically active as you can.
  • Focus on things that bring you comfort, joy, or calm. It’s early spring in Kentucky, so I’ve been spending my off time cleaning out the asparagus bed, shoveling compost, and planting seeds and seedlings. For me, gardening is tangible hope—looking forward to the future of harvesting and cooking what’s being planted.
  • Engage. Social isolation is hard on your soul. It’s a strange time when it’s inadvisable to hug, shake hands, or even be in the same room together. Find or make community when possible. Connect by phone or social media. Check on those who are physically or socially at risk. When possible, make those connections “face to face” through electronics. This week I’m coordinating Zoom gatherings of two sets of friends—I need their company!
  • Reflect. Meditate. Whether it’s a way of claiming some of your newfound extra time, or something you squeeze in on your way to another shift at the hospital, paying attention to your breath and calming your thoughts will certainly feed your soul, your mental health, and your physical well-being.
  • Laugh.
  • Share what you’re learning. I hope you’ll do that in comments here.

We’re in this for the long haul, it seems. Take care of yourself, and be well.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2020

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White supremacy, immigration, Stephen Miller, and more

This week, a report by the Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLC) authored by Michael Edison Hayden revealed 900+ emails sent in 2015 and 2016 from current White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to editors at Breitbart, a very conservative news source. The emails reveal the white supremacy that undergirds many of Miller’s recommendations to President Trump which have become policy, including separating families at the US-Mexico border and a Muslim travel ban. According to the SPLC: Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

There’s much more.

Several news outlets have followed up with this reporting, including the Washington Post, in an article by Kim Bellware. The Post reached out to Miller and the White House for comment. Miller declined to comment Wednesday. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said via email Tuesday that she had not seen the report but called the SPLC “an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization.”

Um, no it is not. The SPLC has a long and respected history of reporting on hate groups, especially in the United States.

The source of the emails was a former editor at Breitbart, Katie McHugh. Fired in 2017 for sending anti-Semitic messages, McHugh has gone through a searching of her own soul, and has renounced white supremacy and white nationalism.

Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed News has written an enlightening and deeply disturbing article about McHugh’s rise and fall in a world where nonwhite people are viewed as enemies and criminals and where Jews are seen as completely responsible for anti-Semitism, stretching the bounds of anyone’s imagination. This world is peopled with holocaust deniers and those who spew anti-Muslim rhetoric.

One group named in the article is VDare, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what would become an English colony, then later the state of North Carolina. Obviously, members of VDare delight in the literal birth of whiteness in the future United States of America. Ironically, and by definition, Virginia Dare was the first immigrant born in an English possession.

The BuzzFeed article is an important read, but you’ll want to take a shower when you’re through with it.

I feel sorry for Katie McHugh; I truly do. I wish her a good life, and am sobered – even encouraged – by her willingness to leave all that hatred behind.

But I feel far more sorry for the people she and those who espouse such horrible ideas have harmed. The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally was the first turning point for Katie McHugh. That rally and its aftermath was also an eye-opener for many Americans who mistakenly thought that white nationalism and white supremacy were non-factors in modern public life.

McHugh decried not the idea of the rally, but its tactics. Eventually she recognized the deep sexism, the wrongness of all its ideals, and the control and power. Eventually, she left. Eventually. But not until much harm was done by her and to her.

From the article: People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system; they have no chance, and they’re just harmful, McHugh said. There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people and tell your story and say, ‘Get out while you can.’

For those of us who watch with horror from the sidelines – what can we do?

We can educate ourselves. We can reach into our own souls, and call on the souls of other good Americans.

We can support the ideals of inclusion, welcome, peace, and diversity. We can remind each other that all people are equally important and valuable.

We can stand up. We can speak out. We can act. We can hold powerful people accountable. We can call for the ouster of white nationalists from the White House. We can say no more.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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The Attorney General of the United States, and religious liberty

Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck. After starting my Political and Spiritual website and blog last week, what a surprise that William Barr, US Attorney General, made a speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame University. It’s a perfect illustration of some of what has become backwards and upside down in our country. You can read his full speech here. Here’s my critique. I apologize in advance that’s it’s lengthy, but—oh my—there’s just so much to say.

  1. The Attorney General has the religion clauses of the First Amendment only half right. Or less than half. I’m no lawyer (and I don’t even play one on TV), but I have studied much over the years about the First Amendment’s relationship to religion. Here’s what the amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Barr only seems to need and want the second clause that prevents congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. I don’t know of anyone who disagrees with that clause. The freedom to worship and believe is at the heart of our country’s foundations.
    1. a. It’s the first clause to which Barr gives brief lip service but apparently doesn’t like—no establishment of religion. This first clause was extremely important to our founders; they had seen the abuse of state-sponsored religion. In Europe, state religions led to discrimination against other faith groups. This pattern reasserted itself in the colonies. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, among others, took the lead in keeping that abuse from being a part of our foundational documents. Madison was behind a change in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that concerned religion. The change from “full Toleration” to “free exercise of religion” marked the difference between having a state religion (Anglicanism) in Virginia that would simply permit other faiths, and granting rights to individuals to follow their consciences with vigor and equality, and without interference. Madison later wrote to Jefferson: I flatter myself we have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.
  2. That Madison quote is compelling, because Barr claims that “secular humanists,” as he calls them, would do just that—make laws that govern others’ beliefs. Barr is not only wrong about that, it’s actually his own combination of law and faith that wants to govern and curtail the beliefs of others.
    1. a. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was designed to protect human rights—individual rights—from government overstep. Yes, this certainly includes religious rights, but also includes the rights of those who are not religious. It definitely isn’t just for the protection of the rights of conservative Christians, which is oddly what Barr seems to advocate. It’s admirable and understandable that AG Barr believes his personal faith is the best and most important expression of right beliefs and morals. It is wrong when the government’s highest legal official makes this a public policy stance.
    1. b. Freedom to exercise one’s religion in America isn’t confined to Christianity. As a matter of fact, all Christians don’t believe the same things, and many Christians don’t conform at all to the beliefs contained in Barr’s talk.
    1. c. Barr either fails to understand or refuses to acknowledge that the founding documents, including the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, were informed not only by Christianity but also by those who espoused Enlightenment ideals and/or Deism—two related philosophical platforms. Deists talked of God, and by that they meant a creator who set things in motion and then stepped back as the universe ran on its own (like a watchmaker building a timepiece). Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Washington, Franklin, and others identified as Deists or followers of the Enlightenment, or some mashup of the two. Both Enlightenment principles and Deism focused on laws that flowed from both reason and morality.
    1. d. So, if the AG is going to disparage “secularists,” he needs to start with the secularists who wrote the very founding documents he uses to support a different view from what they intended.
  3. Secularism vs. faith? This isn’t a reasonable division. Barr is a conservative Catholic, and many other Catholics have already expressed disagreement and dismay at his comments. The Attorney General speaks of an orchestrated scheme by secularists. He says: This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. What’s interesting is that the people he calls secularists and progressives are the ones who are fighting for the rights of all people, including all religious people and the rights of those who do not belong to a particular faith—not just the rights of conservative Christians. Though Barr speaks often of “religion” in his sermon (yes, it’s a sermon—I know a sermon when I see one), he plainly does not mean any other religion besides conservative Christianity. That view is the opposite of what our founders intended.
  4. And there’s more. Barr goes on: Similarly, militant secularists today do not have a live and let live spirit – they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience. Wow. Really? Because from where I sit and stand and preach, it’s people like Mr. Barr who don’t want to live and let live. They want every person to conform to their beliefs. I say beliefs and not actions, because their own actions often don’t conform to what they say they believe. And “militant” secularists? What does that even mean? It recalls the days when women who stood up for their rights were called “militant feminists.” Maybe we still are called that and I haven’t noticed?
  5. Men. Several times Mr. Barr uses the term “man” or “men.” Like this one: Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. While I don’t disagree with that theology, and though I acutely appreciate his accomplished alliteration, I am both surprised and relieved to know that I’m not included in that sentence. I’m not a man. Mr. Barr, please note that while referring to all people as “men” may have been socially acceptable when the Constitution was written, it has been neither socially acceptable nor good writing/speaking for a very long time.
  6. Your freedom to swing your arm ends just where the other person’s nose begins. This famous quote was taught to my first grade class by Mrs. Pippin, our teacher. No lie. On the first day of school she was talking about rules, and the way she told her example story—or the way my 6-year-old mind remembered it—was that a person claimed he hit someone else in the nose because “it’s a free country.” The injured person replied, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.” Why use this expression in a blog about religious liberty? To remind you that while you have all the freedom you need to express and practice your religion, you may not swing your arms of faith so as to impede someone else’s freedom.


The bottom line. Secularism has never been an enemy to democratic principles, and secular people were a driving force in the foundational documents of our country. Far more dangerous are the ideas of those who want to defy our Constitution and laws by claiming their own faith rules for everyone.

I have stood proudly, and will again stand, shoulder-to-shoulder with people who profess other religions or no religion, as we demonstrate for human rights and freedom for all. This is what the framers envisioned.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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A spiritual response to the impeachment inquiry

When I set out to start a website, blog, and podcast about politics and spirituality, never could I have guessed I would launch the website and blog during an impeachment inquiry. If we are to discuss politics here, it would be ridiculous and wrong to avoid a conversation about the most politically volatile events in the last 30+ years.

I hope you’ll join in the discussion, and reflect on it in your faith communities. Here are a few things I believe we should keep in mind as the process unfolds. It’s not an exhaustive list, and I’m certain I’ll add more ideas in the future. Maybe some of those ideas will come from you.

  1. Look for the truth. Everyone is claiming to speak the truth, and often the truth of one speaker is the exact opposite of the truth given by a different speaker. This isn’t new, of course, but in a social media age where the label “fake news” is thrown about many times a day, and where bald-faced lies are sometimes recounted as if they were truth, discernment takes a little more work. How do we look for the truth? As a starter we turn to trusted news sources. Even there, it’s our responsibility to read, watch, and to listen with a critical eye. Any source that is perfectly aligned with a party or particular politician should be highly suspect. That doesn’t mean that even those sources can’t speak truth; we just have to stop being lazy about receiving everything as truth, and about being uncritical. And we must call out leaders who attempt to shut down the truth, or who repeat lies. In the midst of untruth, we recommit ourselves to speaking truth, in love.
  2. Skip the glee. This one is particularly difficult for me. I have to admit that I find some degree of satisfaction when a policy or person with whom I profoundly disagree and who is, in my opinion, deeply flawed is finally expected to answer for misdeeds, lies, and harm done to others or to our political system. I am striving to limit my public responses to ones that are measured, as kind as possible, reasonable, and spiritual. I’m working on making my private conversations equally even, but that is a work in progress, and a determination I have to renew daily. We must all remember that every actor in this crazy current national narrative is a real person even if that person has done really bad things. That humanity is an essential part of our reaction. When we lessen the humanity of another person, we also lessen our own.
  3. Use our power. Together we have far more power than any one of us has alone. Not only should we be exercising our religious and spiritual power with meditation and prayer, we also must exercise our political power. Without the power of the people and the ballot box, those who represent us lose influence. Now is exactly the time to call and write our elected representatives. Again, this is something I find hard to do because my senators and my district’s representative are all wildly interested in retaining and improving their positions of power by supporting the current administration and all its policies. However, that should not keep me from making sure they know what I believe about current events. As a matter of fact, this is precisely the time when I should be speaking out the most – remembering, though, all that I wrote above in my first two points.
  4. Never forget those who are suffering most. When a horrendous decision withdraws our troops and support from the border between Syria and Turkey, we remember the Kurds who are caught in the middle. When policies separate families, or when the President requests cost estimates regarding moats filled with alligators and snakes, we remember the immigrant and the refugee. When officials enact guidelines that favor one race, we remember the non-white citizens and residents. When economic strategy values only the wealthy, we remember the poor. And when we remember, we act.

What happens next in the current administration is very much a question mark. So we listen and pay attention with open hearts, minds, and spirits. Let us not abandon who we are in the face of a crisis of leadership.

Let us hold on to the people and things that give us life even as we watch and wait and hope for a good outcome and a better future.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019