The Wheels on the Bus

      
This post was inspired by singing The Wheels on the Bus with my kids. I had no idea what a controversial song it is. 

I started to sing the version I grew up with, adding a few verses I’ve learned as an adult. “The Daddies on the bus say ‘Knock it off—‘”

“No Mommy,” says my pre-schooler, “It’s not the Daddy who says that, it’s the teacher.”

“Okay, let’s try this verse: The driver on the bus says, ‘Ticket please—“

“No,” he interrupts again. “The driver says, ‘Move on back.’”

The song continues on. My kids don’t like the verse about mommy saying “Shhh shhh shhh.” My daughter doesn’t like the verse about the dog on the bus because her nursery teacher doesn’t sing about a dog. My son thinks I’m silly because dogs don’t ride on busses. I’m beginning to see his logic and wonder why I’ve spent my whole life singing about a dog on a bus when dogs really don’t ride on busses.

We’re finally at the end. I’ve sung all the verses I know, adding and changing to fit the ones my kid’s teachers sing. “What about the money Mommy?”

I let out a sigh. “What money sweetheart?”

“The money on the bus?”

“Okay what does the money do?”

“It goes plink plink plink.”

So I sing one more verse about money going plink plink plink. What can I say? We are a multi-verse Wheels on the Bus singing family.

Silly right, the Wheels on the Bus song being so controversial? But isn’t that how controversial topics are? Silly. I was taught something my way. You were taught something your way. So which way is right? It’s easy to put up barriers that leave us unable to see other ways of looking at things. I could have told my kids, “This is the way I learned it so this is the way we are going to sing it.”

What good would that have done? I doubt we would have gotten through the whole song. My kid’s perspectives would have been tossed out, unvalued. And I would not have seen the error of my ways in singing about a dog on a bus. Instead we sang the longest version of the song I have ever sung, we had fun discovering new things about this bus together, and I came away with a greater vision of what this bus really entails.

Oh how much we could learn from each other if we just pulled down our barriers and tried to understand each other from another perspective. One night my husband and I were debating over the origins of oil. He thought oil came from old dinosaur remains and I thought oil came from the earth’s core. Where these ideas came from, it was hard to pinpoint. Turns out…we were both right…and wrong. We must have been taught competing theories in school. He had been taught that oil comes from ancient waste materials under the earth’s crust. I was taught a theory that is not commonly accepted now, that petroleum comes from carbon-bearing fluids that migrate upward from the earth’s mantle. In our young, imaginative minds, those theories were watered down to dinosaurs vs. earth’s core. It took friction between the opposing thoughts (along with our google search engine) to create greater understanding.

So why do we try so hard sometimes to keep our perspective in a safe place, free from the taint of another’s opposing perspective? In psychology, the term for these opposing thoughts that threaten our current belief patterns is cognitive dissonance. It is painful to experience cognitive dissonance so we have mechanisms to avoid it. As humans, we like order. Through language and other means, our minds make sense of the world around us and try to preserve order by avoiding opposing thoughts that will cause chaos. Some of these mechanisms include only listening to what you want to hear, avoiding uncomfortable conversations altogether, and rationalizing away thoughts that oppose your own beliefs. Another option is to face the opposing information head on, and let your original beliefs change as they need to. By coming through that cognitive dissonance to the other side we come to see a beautiful world beyond the one that our brains have created for us. Enlightenment can come as much through unlearning as it does through learning.

I just read an eye-opening book by Jung Chang called, “Wild Swans.” In it, she talks about what it was like to grow up in communist China, thinking Mao Zedong (one of the most evil men who ever lived) was basically God. He was deified by propaganda and the whole country loved him. She was told by her parents to eat all her food because she should be grateful to live under communism. “Just think about those poor children in the capitalist world who are starving.” Funny, I’ve said something similar to my own children. I will think twice next time I make a statement like that. The cognitive dissonance that Jung Chang experienced as she grew up and realized that Mao was not God and that he was actually an evil dictator, was painful and difficult. Her world was turned upside down and she had to make sense of everything again, including living in a western country where she had always believed life was hellish compared to communist run countries.

I don’t like the pain of wrestling with cognitive dissonance. It leaves me feeling like the floor has been pulled out from underneath me. My stomach gets tied in knots and I feel like I can’t see straight. But I have seen the beauty beyond the pain. There is a rich world out there full of multiple perspectives. I want to spend my time learning from them rather than arguing the rightness or wrongness of them. The only person I can prove right or wrong is myself. I’m wrong if I keep singing the way I’ve always sung just because it’s the way I’ve always sung it.

So I am interested in hearing about moments of cognitive dissonance that you have experienced. Sometimes they are funny like my kids with the Wheels on the Bus song or my husband and I with the origins of oil. Sometimes they are painful like Jung Chang’s experience. Feel free to leave a comment and share your experience with cognitive dissonance.

The Relay Race of Life

I recently read this excerpt from a Utah newspaper:

            “As the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, I am joyful that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act and its discrimination against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional,” said the Right Reverend Scott B. Hayashi, Episcopal Bishop of Utah. “Gay and lesbian people are members of our families, congregations and communities. They raise children, celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. They rent apartments, own homes and pay taxes. They contribute and support the well-being of our state and country. They are people who are made in the image of God. I will continue to welcome them into The Episcopal Church.

            “I am well aware that others believe that the action of the Supreme Court is wrong,” Bishop Hayashi continued. “For these people these decisions are a cause for upset, unhappiness and frustration. My happiness is tempered with this knowledge. Understanding, compassion and prayer for people who deplore this decision is important. They are also made in the image of God. I will be offering my prayers for them and I will continue to welcome them into The Episcopal Church.”

Bishop Hayashi concluded that “all of us can work to make the state of Utah into the place where all people are brought together, where each person is treated with dignity and respect, and where God is seen in the face of each and every person.”
           Tears streamed down my face as I read this and I couldn’t help but wish that I worshipped in this particular congregation.  What kind of man can have that much love for both the LGBT community and the people who oppose gay marriage?

           As I have sought to look through the lens of someone who is gay my feelings on this subject have changed.  I used to debate the issues that surround homosexuality: Are they born that way or not, is it something they choose, is it a sin?  Those things seem inconsequential to me now.  I was not born with that experience and I will never know the answers.  But I was also born with experiences that are misunderstood by people who don’t share my experience.  I have felt unwelcome among people who should have been my friends.  I have also heard people say that the path I am choosing is a sin, that I’m on a slippery slope to hell, that my experience is counterfeit.  My problem is an insatiable desire for satisfying answers.  I need logic and spirit and context and reality and faith to all mesh into one beautiful whole.   

           I can’t accept that I or my religion have all the answers.  It is a vast and beautiful world out there and truth exists everywhere.  It exists in every religion, culture, work of art, and life experience.  It exists among LGBT members who are discovering that their bodies work differently than others.  It exists among conservatives who have a great love for God and want to do His will.  It exists among liberals who have an incredible capacity to love others who are different. 

            Life is an individual journey that we need to discover for ourselves with God.  We each have that capacity.  I have absolute faith in an individual’s ability to discover his/her own purpose in life and create beauty and goodness.  The older I get, the less use I see in the arbitrary lines that guide us all along a well-paved, well-beaten path.  We may all have the same end goal: happiness, love, a fulfilling life.  But we are all different and a path that makes me happy won’t necessarily make someone else happy.

            I just ran a Ragnar relay and at 2am as I ran through a dark mountain pass, I reveled in the relationship I had with the road I was running on.  This was my stretch of road to run.  I felt the curves and climbs, my legs ached with exertion.  The road was shaping me.  I had a living relationship with it.  My team was leap frogging me: stopping up ahead to cheer me on and make sure that I was okay, then driving further up to wait for me once I passed them.  It occurred to me that theirs seemed to be the better means of transportation along this road.  They were warm and comfortable, and they could move along a lot faster than me.  They didn’t have to struggle with the same path I was struggling with.  Part of me longed for the comfort of the car.  But I also realized that when I was in the car, and my fellow teammates came back gasping for air, the first thing they did was to tell us every detail of their experience along the road.  They had had a relationship with that stretch of road that we couldn’t have.  They felt the pressure from the hills, knew what it was like to stumble on rocks and dirt, felt the wind in their faces, felt the lonesomeness of a dark road with no one else around, felt the lifting of their spirits when they passed our van and heard our cheers. 

            Those of us who were in the car didn’t look down on our runners and say, “Your experience is invalid because it’s different from ours.”  We cheered them on.  We supported them in whatever way we could think of to support them.  We gave them water and told them how much longer they had to run.  We couldn’t take the burden or the experience from them, but we could sympathize with them because we had been down other stretches of road as runners.  It was pointless to say the legs I ran were better or harder or more worthwhile than my teammate’s legs because comparison was worthless.  I would never know my teammates legs and they would never know mine.  But we supported each other anyway and shared a communal sense of love, support, and teamwork.   

            How wonderful would it be if life could be like a Ragnar relay.  I don’t just mean that it would be great if life had room for all the crazy people that think it is fun to run for 30 hours with barely any sleep, although that would be great too.  How wonderful it would be if we could support our fellow teammates and trust that what they are feeling and experiencing is legitimate.  What if instead of telling them that the way they are travelling on their path is wrong because our means of transportation seems better, we accept that they are forming a relationship with a life experience that we can never know or fully understand?  What if we remember that we are all runners and will all have our turn?  What if we realize that what we really need is love, encouragement, and maybe sometimes a little help to see what is up ahead?

            I recently left a well-paved, well beaten path that I was on.  It was scary to leave, and the further away from that path I got, the scarier and lonelier it became.  It was of course my path to run alone.  But what I really wanted was support from others.  I wanted someone to cheer me on and give me water and say, “You’re doing great.  It’s hard, but you’ll make it.”  I needed someone to say, “It’s okay that we have different experiences in life.  I can’t fully understand your experience and you can’t understand mine.  But I love you…not in the loving you back into the fold kind of way.  Just loving you and learning from you and being grateful that God gives us different experiences so that love can truly abound.”

            So that is what I say to members of the LGBT community.  I don’t understand your experience, but I am trying to understand you.  And I love you.  I love that you are experiencing what you are experiencing and trying to understand the body you inhabit.  I hope that you find more love and acceptance in the world.  I love that there are people in the world like Bishop Hayashi who aren’t bound by arbitrary lines that force his allegiance to one side or the other.   I am happy to know that there are people who can rise above these lines and purely love both sides. We need each member of our team.  Life is a relay and when we work together, we’ll get to the finish line.