Being in rooms
On lifestyle choices
In the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms. What I mean is that I have spent time with incredible people, amazed and delighted and privileged to be in the same room with them.
Veteran activists seated in a row behind a folding table, explaining the precise planning and detailed logistics of a mostly forgotten, absolutely necessary and righteous direct action.
Friends gathered in chattering clumps my living room, foursomes huddled in conversation on the sofa, beautiful people pulling their chairs into circles, forming connections I only heard about later.
Disaster preparedness advocates congregating in a fire department classroom, smiling encouragingly and sharing tested strategies on how to prepare for and live comfortably through a catastrophe.
At a political meeting last week, I was warmly welcomed by outgoing people I’d only previously known virtually. Even for introverts like me, self-quarantining and social distancing while under orders to shelter in place in San Francisco, it is a loss to not be able to be physically together with other folks right now.
Among the most special rooms I’ve been in recently was a sanctuary, which is not a space I typically occupy by choice. One of the last times I was voluntarily in a place of worship, I attended a service at the social services organization where I sometimes volunteer to serve free meals, the historic, radically inclusive Methodist church, Glide. That particular Sunday morning, I hugged some strangers and danced in the aisles while the house rock band jammed, and Rev. Cecil Williams enthused, “Love the people on the bus!!”
I absolutely love the people on the bus. And I think about that phrasing all the time because it is perfect language—compassionate, apolitical, intentional—to describe a specific way of living with and around other people.
It’s probably a fairly common occurrence that a line in a speech or one small part of a sermon sticks with you as much as the tone or message. A couple of years ago, I attended a dharma talk, and in the middle of a lot of rambling ideas I didn’t retain, the teacher encouraged us all to have neutral experiences. Not everything is positive or negative. Sometimes things just happen. Maybe, he suggested, we could have more experiences at just are.
He was correct. Striving to have neutral experiences is worthwhile. Allowing encounters and exchanges to occur without some kind of assessment or evaluation can feel freeing.
But also, I keep having experiences, in rooms with other people, that are anything but neutral.
In December, a cherished friend I made through our overlapping research interests invited me to a service for World AIDS Day. In a low-slung church in a residential part of Foster City, backed by a wall adorned with panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, an astounding group of queer ministers gathered with about three-dozen congregants to honor and remember people who died from HIV/AIDS.
The clergypeople assembled that afternoon are quiet radicals who should be renowned for their moral, righteous leadership and honored for their spiritual endurance. I was overwhelmed to be in the same room with each of them individually, let alone all of them at the same time. To most people, I suppose they are mere pastors. To me, they are luminaries, having lead congregations during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. They cared for many hundreds of beloved community members, most of whom died. And they continue to serve marginalized folks who are often rejected and made to feel isolated and alone, even (sometimes especially) in communities of faith.
Under light rain in the parking lot, Bishop Yvette Flunder emerged from her red sports car and tightly hugged my friend and me like we were known to one another. Then we filed through sliding doors into a small sanctuary, where we said aloud the names of loved ones who died in the AIDS pandemic, all embraced each other some more, and sang, “Sing the Wondrous Love of Jesus,” because as the line in that hymn goes, we will all get to heaven. You don’t have to believe in much to agree that the hereafter is for everyone.
Rev. Todd Atkins-Whitley offered some reflections on resistance, about coping with loss and bigotry. Then he said something that I have thought about every single day since then. Sometimes I am walking down the street, and I mutter his words to myself like a manta.
“A lifestyle choice is shunning people and leaving them to die alone.”