If you look at the history of the rise of Nazism, and you blend the postures and the job descriptions of the Brown Shirts and the Gestapo, you get a pretty good idea of the activities of ICE in American cities today. I have gathered this impression by watching several undoctored videos. The point is to terrorize, to create a permanent climate of insecurity, to round up a large enough number of people that justifies the claim of the existence of an “internal enemy,” and to kill on the spot those who do not comply.
I am deeply sorry to write these words, and even more to witness the events that I am describing. I don’t think that any of us were expecting to see what we are seeing. Except — as it has been noticed — those targeted groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, who always knew in their bones what the unhinged fury of racism means and how it is always on the verge of exploding. The trauma that many white people are experiencing now is not new to them.
What can we do at times like these, in order not to lose hope and zeal for life? Matthew Fox wrote in 1976:
Finally, there is the wee-ness of us all. (…) We are small, truly small, before Chartres Cathedral or Beethoven’s Last Quartets or a ripe sunset over the sea; and we are small, also, standing on the soil of Dachau, hearing of FBI, CIA, and presidential abuse of the people’s power, or kneeling when hearing of the assassination of a beloved leader. And there is some very great truthfulness in this — that we are small. That life — and its extremes — are borne through but not by ourselves. That we are, in a word, wee-ful folk.
I think that this page can be adapted very well to our circumstances today. But the next step that Matthew suggests can also. Then, as well as now, the answer is not falling into despair because of our wee-ness, but opening ourselves to the vastness of love and pain that we can contain in it, remembering what a miracle it is to be human. Matthew writes:
For all the vastness and divinity and touching of skies and sea and power and love of which we are capable, we are still but a spark in a live wire, destined to last as long as the flash of a firework. Though we be creators and revel in it, we are created creators, not self-made creators. First, we have received.
It is at this point that Matthew explains that to recognize the wee-ness (…) is to recognize our responsibility to pass on the WHEE-NESS. He means to bequeath the possibility of the experience of the divine, of the joy of living, of ecstatic experience, to those who are around us, and to those who come after. He continues: What more dare we ask for, beg for, even pray for than to be instruments of something bigger than we are: instruments of ecstasy.
That’s it. The deeper the dragons try to push us down and make us feel small, the higher we need to rise. Not by making ourselves look big. And not being sorry that we cannot do enough — inflation and deflation of the ego are really not helpful, especially at this time.
My plea is for us to rise in the awareness that we are already doing our job, and we are doing it pretty well, if we remember the ecstasy of life and we pass it on. No matter what the context is. I dare say, now more than ever.
I think that Renee Good was enjoying life, that her enjoyment gave her the strength to act in defense of others, and that the ICE thug who murdered her saw that enjoyment on her face and heard it in her words. He misunderstood it as a taunt, as deeply broken people do, and fired to kill not just her, but his own hope of redemption.
Renee was murdered, but she did not die without passing on her joy and zest for life. She never meant to be a hero or a saint, but also she did not take her wee-ness as a pretext not to act, not to pass on what it means to be human. That is what we are called to do with our wee-ness. No more, no less.
Banner Image: All things are connected; small actions lead to large outcomes: “The Butterfly Effect.” Painting by Anastasiya Markovich; photo by Picture Labberté K.J. On Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree that we should take all care not to use our wee-ness as a pretext? And do you feel the connection between the acknowledgement of our wee-ness and the responsibility of passing on the WHEE-NESS?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality , pp. 242-243.
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic–and Beyond
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
6 thoughts on “Our wee-ness”
Thank you, Luigi. A wonderful piece.
GG, your words and questions seem confusing to me. But I interpret your excellent and spiritual DM to mean that we’re both uniquely human and Divine in our spiritual journeys of Loving Diverse Oneness with one another, with Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Her graceful abundance, and with All Our Sacred physical/nonphysical multidimensional/multiverse beings/Co-Creation in Our evolving Loving Living Cosmos in the Sacred process of the Eternal Present Moment….
Hello from a fellow Lay Dominican! God bless you in your work and know that you are still a son of Dominic in my eyes! Peace
I –KNOW– the potential of the soul for Union: I’ve experienced the Mystical Union directly. But I also know the powers that would keep me small:
The Church, whose interpretation of the Creation in the Bible usually leaves out women’s equality, and definitely leaves out — or even forbids — our ability to have Mystical Union The Republican forces that would trample individuality and would demand obedient silence. But also my own small self, who is old, and now becoming more disabled and depressed. It’s very hard to live up to the Best, when life hits you with so much.
So I cope as best I can.
But I also leave you with the words of a Mystic — not a famous one like Eckhart, but just a regular everyday one (me). If you want to learn about Mysticism, for whatever reasons, you can read my posts in the “comments” sections of the archives.
It’s the “best” of what I am.
There is the weee, the wheee! and the we. We shall weee, wheee!, we all the way home. Weee are but a blip in the history of humanity, wheee are here to experience joy, and we are not alone.
Blessed Be,
Emily Hassler
While today’s meditation emphasizes current darkness and Matthew Fox’s wisdom on “our wee-ness,” I wish to focus on a smaller point, a word that you used here and in another recent meditation: “dragons.” What do you have against dragons that you demonize them as your metaphor for evil? While Christian/Catholic mythology portrays dragons as beasts to be destroyed, non-Western cultures see them as complex creatures and often revere them, for example, in Chinese culture. When we demonize anyone, any group, any creature, any being, we begin the process of dehumanizing or denying or de-divining them, that leads to legitimizing killing them. We can easily substitute the phrase, evil forces.