Life In The Turn Lane

Pause and Refresh

2009-12-12T19:17:00.001-05:00

December 12, 2009

I don't know about others, but I've reached my saturation point. My capacity for complexity seems full. So, climate change conferences, sex scandals - too numerous to be considered scandals anymore, shifting healthcare amendments and compromises, even the wish lists of needy neighbors have pushed me into information overload. All this and the incessant 50 year old Christmas songs that blare in every public space; why is it that someone has not written new popular Christmas music? Or better yet, why not turn down the volume so that my numbers-challenged brain can think about the merits of 50% off the list price plus another 15% off.

The net effect is that I'm turned off and tuned out. The complexity of the culture has accomplished what LSD proponents searched for. What I've tuned in to is respite: from candle lit Taize services, to baking cookies, and replacing CNN with meditation like the white "smoke" curling up out of chimneys on these frosty mornings. This common wintry scene has a Currier & Ives quality for me bringing images of fireside comfort, hot cider and all things snug and warm, contrasted with the sharp, cold, relentless jolts offered by the media as news of the day.

This week's advent collect strikes a sympathetic chord:

"Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us, and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us..."

It's the "...with great might come among us..." that resonates with me. What if we don't notice when it happens? Just in case, I've turned my attention to moments of herald.

I think Barack's Nobel mode and speech is one of them. Not pandering to international powers, acknowledging the realities of war in tandem with the ideals of peace, and the strength of resolve, he seems to me 'a great might' that's come among us. Surely this is a time for his gifts of intellectual clarity, and ability to place our idealism along side the nuts and bolts of war on both our health care system and terrorism. Considering what he's trying to do, the nit-picking political arguments of the day seem tawdry by comparison.

Another "great might" that's come among us is a little booklet with a big message about immigration. Called, Cincinnati: A City of Immigrants it was originally funded by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Humanities Council with 25 civic co-sponsors. Perhaps because this area of the country has been more resistant to change than others, we see the negative effects of this resistance more easily. As I understand it, it was some recent, unfortunate effects of discrimination that prompted this project.

Subtitled "Struggling Toward Acceptance and Equality", this project follows the history of six ethnic immigrations into southern Ohio. It is intended for use in junior high schools because "the struggles for acceptance and equality encountered by Cincinnati's immigrants are not normally taught in schools." Is there any age that's more concerned about identity, belonging and rejection that junior high students?

Most of us are not aware that in the 1850's "immigrants (German and Irish) were killed during riots in Cincinnati that were organized by local residents".

The research that underlies this project shows that each wave of immigration followed the same pattern: isolation, rejection, assimilation. Of the six groups described my perception is that only three, German, Irish and Jewish seem to have moved through all phases, melding with the protestant settlers of English origin who came from New England in 1788. But maybe it's only two. The other groups still struggling: Africa-American, Appalachian, and Hispanic.

Once health care moves to the back burner, immigration reform will come under our national microscope and overwhelm our governmental and cultural systems. We will be sorely in need of "great powers" of reconciliation, and awareness to come among us. Cincinnati and its illuminated history are the canary in this social coal mine. We will need 'a Barack Obama' to help us glue the pieces of reform together with the spiritual, idealistic platitudes we think underlie the American experiment.

So, the Lord is gracious unto us; great powers do come among us. My prayer is that we not be so "sorely hindered by our sins" that we miss them, and the hints toward salvation they provide.

In this time of cold analysis and political in-fighting, may we all find fireside warmth, hot cider and all things snug and warm promised by the curling white smoke of our wintry chimneys.

Do Good. Together.

It's' Dark In Here

2009-12-05T19:41:00.001-05:00

December 5, 2009

Shhh! I'm waiting; sitting here in the dark of Advent waiting for the light; the light of the winter solstice, the light of love. The collect for this 2^nd Sunday prays:

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation:

Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins...Book of Common Prayer

Thank goodness for Advent. It takes me away from our bleak season of political nastiness and military solutions. Last week we were called to "put on the armor of light". This week's collect starkly frames our contemporary situation for me. We have messengers aplenty contemporary prophets who draw clear pictures of our predicaments, but after thousands of years we're still in need of "grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins." Reinhold Niebuhr seems appropriately right that "nations, classes and races do not love one another. They just express this sense of obligation in the desire to give each one his due." "The Spirit of Justice", Christianity and Society, 1950. And these days, we cannot seem to manage even that.

I guess "prophets" by nature are a fringe group who speak their truth to the majority; sort of an Advent voice, telling us to "wake up". Because of them we see our situation outside the consensus. Without the views of Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Wendell Berry, George Soros, Ralph Nader, Elizabeth Warren, Noreena Hertz et al the world would be even darker than it is.

Once upon a time Barack Obama* would have been on my list; that would have been back in the days of his uplifting presidential campaign. Now we have the dour, ever present Obama called upon to govern, so entrapped by our military, economic, political systems that he seems immobile so limited are his, and our, choices.

I suppose it is naïve to think that someone from "outside" could act on the principles of his campaign once "inside". Maybe he's as frustrated by these constraints as many of us are. He has my admiration and sympathy for trying to deal with the horrendous burdens of his office and, like all of us, does the best he can.

Wendell Berry has always quietly preached repentance and tried to show a way toward societal "salvation". In his recent essay, "The Cost of Displacement", he says:

"Our present economic failures involve moral issues of the gravest sort. An essentially immoral system of economy-as-finance...run by the sole standard of monetary profit, has been allowed to flourish to the point of catastrophe..." "The Cost of Displacement", The Progressive, Dec.'09 Jan.'10.

Berry sees that this consequence has turned greed into a cardinal virture. He describes "the economy" as

"...a ramshackle, propped up, greed-enforced anti-economy that is delusional, vicious, wasteful, destructive, hard-hearted, ...trading in various pure-nothings."

Berry reminds that in the '30's people from Kentucky who had been displaced by the economic devastation of those times "went home", where they could squeeze in with family, be supported by friends grow a garden, milk a cow. He asks, now where will the jobless go? "Not home, for there are no 1930's homes to go to."

Berry's new poem, "Questionairre"**, gives food for Advent thought. Here are two excerpts:

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Repentance, anyone?

So I sit here in the dark that only seems to get darker because of things done and left undone. So far Niebuhr is right, darkness seems built into the human condition and experience. Night follows day. Why are we always surprised? I have this comforting image of an endless line of candle flames lit against the darkness by the community of saints through the ages.

There seems nothing to do except wait, add my candle flame to the line and sing a song of our faith ancestors:

"Within our darkest night you kindle the fire

that never dies away, never dies away."***

Doing Good. Together.

___________________________________________________________

Garry Wills, "Afghanistan: The Betrayal." http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/03-11

** "Questionnaire"
(a poem by Wendell Berry)

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

*** Sing along with the Taize Community Choir: "Within Our Darkest Night": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MS6fE7lcCc

A Sad Happythanksgiving

2009-11-28T19:04:00.001-05:00

December 5, 2009

I'm not sure naming the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday was intended to have a double meaning. Black as in merchandising profits and, these days, Black as in bleak. Thanks - giving is probably not first on the list of concerns for those of us in debt, without homes or job prospects.

Even for those of us without acute economic distress these are not the best of times, nor the worst of times, but "angry and nasty" times according to NY Times'columnist Judith Warner. She finds it in parking lot encounters and elevator rudeness where people show "a kind of thin-skinned intolerance that justifies itself as an injured sense of propriety but is, in fact, nothing more than free-floating hate."

I'm getting a bit edgy myself as Tuesday's military speech by President Obama approaches. Escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan seems predestined; it's redundant to say this is not the kind of change I believe in. To me Obama's direction of more, not less, cancels his words of peace and, even tarnishes his Nobel Peace Prize. Historian Gary Wills has written this week:

"I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president."

Wills goes on to suggest that Obama's political sacrifice would be worth it to put an end to endless war.

"But I would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office."

...Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president." November 23, 2009, The New York Times Review of Books

I saw the rock musical Hair recently. It's the 40 year old rendition of the cultural and human conflicts during the Vietnam War; a mirror of our issues and Wills' comments. Stunning! It celebrates life and paints the black/bleak costs of Empire in music at 120 db. Not only did it work, it elicited tears for many of us, tapping how we really feel about war, politics and adolescent struggles.

To me that's the value of the arts to connect reality to the human experience, feelings and all. Clapping and singing Let the Sunshine In with the cast and audience was a nostalgic oasis in our desert of overly analyzed, data driven Information.

Where's our music, poetry, art?

We hear about how many military personnel have whatever variety of injuries, how much rehabilitation costs, the toll on their families. I'd like to hear some discussion about human vulnerability that perhaps people are not made for war and multiple tours of duty.

There's a cure for PTSD and amputations stop the conditions that create them. Or, dear Barack, at least talk about that possibility. You make good speeches put some words of real peace in our heads.

I still have an ember of hope left that you will at least say the words, because words do matter; they keep ideas alive. But, after Tuesday my ember will probably turn to ash.

An earlier war, World War II, pushed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to incorporate the evils of society into his worldview of God and creation. His conclusion:

"...humans are caught between our freedom and our limits [mortality], we are desperately fearful."

We deal with this fear by denial of our limits hubris.

"This shows itself in "arrogance, pretension and self-interest." "The Ethic of Love and the Ways of the World", Ross McKenzie, Education for Ministry series: Theological Choices.

Could there be any better description for these bleak times?

Wills said, "...some leader has to break the spell..." How about 'some leader' talking real talk and not the perpetuation of our denial. Maybe that's why we're hearing more about costs of health care and the war(s) and little about the human morass in which we find ourselves. We've given the microphone to Sarah and her teabagging friends to act out our denial for us. That makes me twice afraid.

Martin Luther King, Jr and Gandhi lived in bleak times too. But they were realists they carried the dream of justice as they battled the forces of hubris. Their dreams, our dreams, did not die with them. Neibuhr calls us to accept

"...the idea that our dream of social perfection (the Kingdom of God) is God's to fulfill and not ours, then we can work together toward that end without illusion or despair."

Somehow, I see Barack attempting to walk this path. The hubris of his detractors on the right and left obscures this reality.

The message I hear in this season of reflection: Yes, it's bleak; but that's not all. We have the light of "working together without illusion or despair."

For this I'm thankful.

Doing Good. Together.

Who Sez?

2009-11-14T19:12:00.001-05:00

November 14, 2009

I wonder what the chances are of a Wailing Wall as one of the many new constructions in my metropolitan area. Not very high, I suspect. I also suspect I would not stand there alone, mourning the destruction of the community's values along with its skyline.

Five times in 20 years Ohio citizens had rejected the creation of gambling casinos in Ohio; but not this time. Bedazzled with jobs, jobs, jobs, they could not resist, I guess. To my mind that deserves a Wail. Connected to it is the realization that one of the owners of these yet-to-be-built castles of chance has made his money from "quick loans" for home mortgages on the internet! Surely there's a story in this mix that I don't want to hear.

Another Wail is the skeleton of a skyscraper (41+ stories) that already dwarfs all but one other building in the city and changes the shape of the skyline. I hadn't heard there was a dearth of office space downtown that justifies this steel and glass behemoth blotting out the sunlight for blocks.

And yet another sign of "progress" is the purchase and proposed renovation of a downtown apartment building into a "world-class hotel" and contemporary arts center. The "lucky" recipients of this progress are 213 current low-income residents who get to move to they-know-not-where.

Yessiree! This city is on the move! What I want to know is, Who Decides? Who says, this skyscraper here, that hotel there. Oh sure, the voters said o.k to the casino, but somebody had the idea, picked the location, got it on the ballot. Who are all these somebodies? The Empire knows!

Speaking of Empires. The President of ours remarked at Ft. Hood, that, "This is a time of war." Who decides that, I wonder. Couldn't somebody else say 'The time of war is over'? Aren't these simply decisions made by the Somebodies who make decisions? Who decided that those who serve in this time of war are mostly young people from the less privileged classes; who decided to send recruiters into the high schools and give them unfair access to students?

Just like The Wall in Jerusalem that was left after the Roman Empire's destruction of the Jewish Temple, maybe our Empire will leave us a place where we can lament our tattered ideals of justice and peace.

For me that includes the loss of our initiative. Where are the thousands of us massed on the Capitol steps who say Yes to the public option of Healthcare reform; who say Yes to curbs on corporate health care profits, and restrictions for the finance industry? Maybe we're too busy writing our prayers for The Wall.

Or are we like the people in Czeckoslovakia Jan Klan, a Communist Party candidate says,

"In the old [Communist] days, too, the party ordered Zabori nad Lbem residents to regularly clean up their village. They resented it, but the village stayed tidy. Today, no one is required to pick up litter or tend to vegetation and residents decry the slovenliness." The Christian Science Monitor, Vol 101 issue 115.

Do they have a shortage of trash bags and trowels?

I'd rather think we could be like the citizens of Spokane, Washington. This year they tried to pass a Community Bill of Rights; it didn't pass, but

"thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods." Yes! Magazine, 11-05-09.

Imagine the community conversations they had while drawing up this document and getting it on the ballot! First they wailed, then they worked!

James Carroll reminds during this celebration of the Fall of the Berlin Wall,

"...[there were] pressures from below of grass-roots movements for peace on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Gorbachev and Reagan deserve full credit for ending the nuclear standoff nonviolently, but they could not have done it without the "naive'' determination of their respective populations to reject war."

"The Rusting and Fall of the Iron Curtain" Boston Globe 11-09-09

Populations rejecting war?!! And we think we're powerless. My question is, how much destructive silliness will we tolerate before we, as a population say, Enough! We'll get more tolerance practice this winter as the Tea Baggers gear up for more healthcare Town Hall rants. The rest of us seem a long way from saying, Enough to them, to war, to casinos.

Like Tevye, the master wailer in Fiddler On the Roof, I wonder:

"Lord, who made the lion and the lamb,

You decreed I should be what I am,

Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan "

If we were to trust We Can?

Doing Good. Together.

New Wineskins

2009-11-08T15:52:00.001-05:00

November 7, 2009

I don't get it. Wouldn't we tell a child to ignore the name-calling bullies at school? The theory being that their attention span would not tolerate a no-response response and they would move on.

Maybe Maureen Dowd's mother forgot the how-to- deal-with-bullies speech. Maureen cannot let the bait go she cannot ignore our resident bully, Rush Limbaugh. I guess it's just another opportunity for her wit, "Who Are You Calling A Narcissist, Rush?", NYTimes 11-4-09.

"But on Sunday, he (Rush) ripped the president for having "an out-of-this-world ego," for being "very narcissistic," "immature, inexperienced, in over his head." (Isn't immaturity scoring OxyContin from your maid?)

It gives new meaning to pot, kettle and black."

Ho hum. Same ole, same ole. How does my momentary snicker move things forward? Where is our imagination for seeing and doing something new?

No matter its content, entertainment "...holds attention, diverts, amuses". I don't know if Ms. Dowd considers herself an entertainer, but I do. Like a starving person who dreams of food that nourishes and finds mostly mountains of popsicles, distractions and amusements no longer work for me.

This bully thing is complicated. A friend, Kristen Barker, used her training as a non-violent peace maker on some bullies sitting behind her at Sen. Sherrod Brown's Town Hall on Health care. Kristen describes how she engaged the shouting tea-baggers:

For every shouted "Obama is going to kill you" and "Liars" Kristen countered with "You sound scared. What frightens you?" For her efforts she got back, "You don't have a brain cell in your head!" and other conversation stoppers. Kristen is nothing if not persistent:

"At the end one of the former loud and angry detractors behind me smiled, shook my hand and wished me luck with my daughter." Fall 2009 newsletter of the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center.

I know I'm not that persistent. I know "You don't have a brain cell in your head" would strike me mute. I know I'm naïve.

I see tea-bagging comments like these as forms of de-humanization of the 'other'. The ultimate dehumanization, of course, is murder. Three men were executed by the people of Ohio in July and August, 2009; four more are scheduled for 2010. Executed, murdered, whatever... killing is killing.

But!! Ohio's Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has called for a moratorium on executions, "A civilized society does not abide barbarism to ease its pain." Aha! Unlike Maureen, Kristen and Jennifer are not same ole; they write new scripts that challenge very old patterns.

Speaking of new scripts, how about that multi-billionaire Warren Buffet? Buying a whole railroad to make a point? He bought 10+ million shares of Burlington, Northern, Santa Fe Railroad. Buffet said, "Most important of all, however, it's an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States, I love these bets,". 11-05-09 Daily Mail

Ordinarily I wouldn't stop to muse on Buffet's purchases, but I'm reading Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us" where Mr. Buffet is one of the lead characters. In this "fictional vision of what could become a new reality", the country's richest guys gather and make plans to save the world economy and all.

According to Nader's 733 page thesis these mostly elderly gentlemen want to leave a legacy of meaning down to the seventh generation and realize their gazillions of contributions have not substantially changed the game. By pooling their experience and connections they hope to put in motion a whole new game called justice. How about Ted Turner's "Billionaires Against Bullshit"? The thesis and its plans are so plausible, they're spooky. I've put Mr. Buffet and his real world "friends" on my radar and will, as they say, "Stay Tuned".

New behaviors? New scripts? Amazing. This week Biblical Scholar Walter Brueggemann cleared a path through the old scripts of the Old Testament. He led us to see prayer as a saving strategy for times of oppression like these; but, not the conversational "please and thank you" prayers of modern times. Brueggeman says our prayer heritage is one of entitlement (of the covenantal relationship with God); of urgency (the expressed pain of oppression) and expectation (our God answers).

Brueggemann's conclusion: The decrees of Empire cannot be changed, but the decrees of Yahweh can be, through prayer. Expressing our pain and urgency helps change God's mind and allows us to imagine ourselves differently. Who would we be and what would the world look like if our prayers of pain were answered? Can we deal with a God who does not rearrange the trinkets on the game board and, instead, creates a whole new board?

New social scripts? A pragmatic, contemporary script for justice? Socially conscious super-rich? Looks like You hear us.

Excuse me, God:

Could You hurry with the instructions for this new game?

Perhaps we already have them.

----------------------------------

Addendum: All this and healthcare reform too! Looks like Walter is right: God's mind can change when we let loose the pain.

Doing Good. Together.

A New World- Within

2009-02-28T19:13:00.001-05:00

A New World Within

Goodbye February. Hello Lent. Almost all the bad things that have happened to me have happened in February. I'm sorry if the misfortunes of my personal February connections have cast a spell onto this February's financial debacle.

But, what a relief, it's Lent; I have official sanction to drop out. My body says you've had enough of the doomsayers and the uncertainty of our financial reality so, let them go.

My spirit says what's taken so long? Why haven't you used the tools God's given you intuition, meditation and prayer? I guess the din of the noise out there, has masked my small inner voice, which, right now, isn't so still. Pay attention, it says, I have things to say.

My intuition always has had something to say; but I've often neglected it; how to rely on something so insubstantial? Of course, the substantial has now morphed into the insubstantial, so I might as well rely on the insubstantial I know intimately my intuition - rather than on the insubstantial reports from CNN and my financial statements.

My intuition gave its own summary of Barack's speech Tuesday night: yes, Barack all that they say about you is true; yes, Barack, I believe in the hope; yes, Barack, I hear you. I just don't believe you.

It's not you, personally or politically; it's the public context and framework from which you must organize, orate and operate that weighs me down. How could it be that our every public moment is spent talking, thinking, plotting about money?

I agree with Barack that we can shape our world. We've shaped the one we have either by action or inaction and it's turned into corporate oligarchy. If this is an opportunity to create something different, will the shape of our economy and the country's vision remain pretty much as it is or will the form itself change?

The Amish have shaped their world - differently from ours they forgive murderers. Ticht Naht Hanh has created a world Plum Village in France - shaped without personal ownership. The shape of the Mondragón Corporation in Spain is one of the world's largest worker cooperatives; worker managed.

The United Kingdom changed the form of its health care from private to public, and - I recently read that on the day it switched over nothing happened, no riots or demonstrations; just more sick people going to the doctor.

So, Barack, how we get to the "there" of your vision from the "here" of our current systems is a little squishy. Yes, we have an historic opportunity; yes we're not "quitters" as the South Carolina student told him; and also yes: our record so far shows no hint that we have the right stuff to build a future fundamentally different from our past. My intuition tells me this is worrisome.

It's probably no coincidence that Lent occurs at the end of winter in preparation for the creativity and new life of Easter. Barbara Crafton, Almost daily eMo, offers me an appropriate Lenten guide:

"Remember that you are tired, that you need to slow down, that you need to think."

That's right, I am; I do.

"Remember what you long ago forgot."

What I forgot was to rely on my intuition that 9/11 was not a surprise considering what was happening globally; that McMansions were not real; that "the race to the bottom" was real and not just a political slogan. Because I forgot, I did not speak my truth I let the party line stand.

"We don't have to make it right all by ourselves."

This is one I think I haven't forgotten. I have been graced by a church community that struggles with the tension created by our generous corporate ancestors' endowed gifts and our efforts to "make it right" for the poor and needy of our community.

I was heartened by the iconic image of Barack our black president standing in front of our woman Speaker of the House of Representatives and our white male vice-president and the congressional audience's diversity. We now see though the race/gender glass a little less darkly.

Significant though it is, maybe that accomplishment of diversity is not all we can do. Maybe we'll still have the energy and grit to make the world new again - again. Maybe we'll have the courage to admit to ourselves that we'd like a Good Life* - based on human, not corporate, values. Our financial melt-down is man made, not a God-send for reflection, yet, the timing of our economic straits with the Lenten season is stunning.

"This is an historic moment that warrants self-evaluation as we envision a better world. And the vision we project to ourselves will be reflected in the world we create.

Change always starts from within."**Joe Brewer

Often by following one's intuition.

Doing Good. Together.

21 days till it's official

Snowdrops are blooming!

*(video) The Good Life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McvCJley78A

**Beyond Scarcity: Re-Inventing Wealth in a Progressive World

by Joe Brewer

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/24-1

The Obama Code by George Lakoff:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/25-12

Will We Go?

2009-02-14T19:13:00.001-05:00

Will We Go?

What a contrast! Eight white, middle-aged, male bank CEOs lined up before Congress protecting themselves vs. five men and women + explaining to Larry King how they had protected the 155 people of flight #1539. Could there be greater iconic images of our 21st Century American Life?

From what I read and hear others seem as touched as I have been by this stark contrast of values. It seems to me these images have tapped something deep in our citizen character; deep enough for tears of anger, frustration, and mistrust of the bankers and their impotent leaders; tears of admiration and empathy for the love shown by Capt. Sullenberger, his crew, passengers and their rescuers.

This is a trip on Peggy Noonan's "trolley" of our country: the one with the wheels falling off and the trolley off the tracks. I see our old passive, semi-stable lives lying wounded next to the wreckage, with few first responders in sight. In our shock we haven't begun to examine the tracks to see what might have caused this economic and governmental crash or to wonder about its stations of disintegration.

We need wonder no more. California shows what the next stop will be: extremes of no tax (no government) and "me/my" freedoms: thousands of government workers laid off; services to the community and the needy disappearing, prisoners released, apparent inability to compromise, cooperate to govern, really. I know they consider themselves avant-garde but, seriously folks, this is serious.

If we want to keep moving, we may need to look for different tracks, different stations. I've become acquainted with a few of the pioneering architects who, for years, have been drawing the blueprints for just such change. They range from professors at Xavier University, Quaker economists, compassionate constitutional lawyers (yes, Virginia, there are such people), philosophers of democracy and Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann. They've joined my personal think-tank.

These designers of economic and governmental alternatives hear the same message I get from Capt. Sully, his crew and passengers: imminent death clears the mind so we can see the primacy of the human web in which we all exist. They prove that love is the primary force of our lives no matter how we might ignore it. They demonstrate that it is not the particulars of economic class, race, gender that unites or divides us it is our humanness, our ability to help each other, to empathize and from that to grow love. We are family as they emphatically demonstrate. Instead of an airplane we're all on the trolley wreck that teaches that our economic and governmental structures need to reflect this reality of our human-ness. Talk about repairing our infrastructure!

If we choose to do that, we'll need to create the tools to reconsider the constitution, to create a fitting economic system, to critique democracy. And, most of all, we'll need to admit to ourselves that the way it's been is not the way we want it to be; and to talk with each other of alternatives, to actually live and breathe as the government by the people.

I don't have a clear itinerary of the stations on our alternative tracks, but it looks like the destination needs to be justice, not profit. Brueggemann reminds that justice is a major concern of the Bible and the faith story of a people's relationship to their Creator and each other:

[justice] refers to securing and guaranteeing the livelihood, well-being, freedom and dignity of every person in the community, not only those strong enough to insist upon it." Peace

That would be the reality of human hope fulfilled. Brueggemann reminds that this reality is what is meant by shalom: "assured well-being" in the context of freedom, where order not chaos - reigns . Shalom is fulfilled through justice. Justice is our work; shalom our motivation.

This hope of mankind has prompted and pushed Barack Obama to the presidency. Now it will be up to us, the riders on the trolley, to set the trolley on the tracks of justice and shalom. The drivers of the trolley will not and cannot do it. Maybe that's the message of Obama's visits to the People. We are the Exodus people, in bondage to a broken economic system, injured from the trolley wreck, crying for some way to influence events. The Exodus story is our story. Will we play our role? I wonder. Brueggemann makes clear what that means:

For biblical faith, the "ought" of life received its basic form one lost night in ancient Egypt when a slave mother came into the hovel where the children were sleeping, covered their mouths to keep them quiet, awakened them and said, "Come, we're going now." Brueggemann, Peace

And they went.

Doing Good. Together.

35 days till Spring Y

NOTES:

"It is going to take a very focused civic jolt from you all to your Senators and Representatives. A couple of million jolters from our large country can get the train moving on the tracks. It doesn't take much time to holler, yell or bellow with the facts." Ralph Nader, "It's Going To Take A Civic Jolt", 2-14-09 Common Dreams

"the banking and financial services industry has become a kind of ruling oligarchy that stifles attempts to shake up the status quo and make the real change necessary to get us out of the current crisis. "Either you break the power," Johnson said, "or we're stuck for a long time with this arrangement... Simon Johnson "The Oligarchy's Bailout Bail", 2-14-09 Common Dreams

Be The Peace

2009-01-31T19:02:00.001-05:00

Be The Peace

Please say it isn't so that we will have to endure eight+ more years of haranguing by the right wing opposition! I had so looked forward to a rest from their repetitive rhetoric of the past eight. The difference now is no matter what question is asked by an interviewer or what options are offered no matter who's answering - their response is always the same: lower taxes, smaller government, no deficit and on and on - a mantra of ideology like Chinese water torture. I may wear out my noise reduction headphones.

One conservative House member said their strategy of opposition should be to act like a swarm of mosquitoes making life miserable for the majority. Conciliation? Cooperation? Putting dialogue and compromise first? Forget it! Methinks this won't work.

Speaking of what doesn't work - the Israel and Palestine situation is high on the list. * I've just read The Lemon Tree the non-fiction story by Sandy Tolan of one Israeli woman, Dalia, and one Palestinian man, Bashir, who discover they had shared one house: Bashir was a child in it his father had planted the lemon tree; Dalia's family (from Bulgaria) moved in after Israel became a state in 1948 (Bashir's family had been forcibly relocated). Dalia's family had nurtured the tree.

After 30+ years of sporadic communication, and considerable personal caring, these two people still cling to their view of a reality that has its seeds, roots and blooms all hooked into the past. At least they agreed that the house should become a nursery school for Arab-Israeli children and a center for dialogue called Open House.

As an Israeli settler in the West Bank said, on last week's 60 Minutes, she will never, never, never give in. That's how I hear our right wing American folks who apparently now have Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin as their spokespeople. The country and our perils seem but vehicles for their very loud oratory and quest for power.

At least we've identified a majority of American citizens who want to do more than fight from the extremes. Of course we want a solution to our economic and world problems, and we also want a solution to intractable, non-thinking ideological opposition from all sides that keeps us and half the world in political head-lock .

I want this because our faith stories as well as our life experience teach that fulfilled human beings need stable, peaceful surroundings; stable, caring relationships. We need to be able to live and love as humans not as consumers, not as settlers, not as stockholders, rock stars, CEO's or governors, red or blue.

Thich Naht Hanh offers a bail out for our seemingly impossible ideological freeze in his recent book The Art of Power. Hanh has lived the consequences of real and ideological warfare. He was ultimately exiled from his native Vietnam because of his peace work during the Vietnam War. He is a Buddhist monk who teaches how to actually be the peace we crave.

He tells of his return to Vietnam in 2005 after his 40 year exile. He took with him 200 people from his community who were trained in being peace. The Communist Vietnam government actively discouraged people from coming to hear them,

"Yet we continued to be humble and calm, and to smile..."

They were allowed to organize a talk to officials.

"They [the government] provided seats for 300 people. But because we were practicing loving speech and deep listening, at the last minute we were able to persuade them to let the crowd come in. ...more than 1,000 attended the talk."

Ultimately they spoke to crowds of 6-7,000 and were invited to speak to Communist Party members all without law suits, threats or media blitz.

"We felt we could tell the truth; we could share what was in our heart, because we knew how to use the language of loving speech. ...This experience showed us powerfully how a small minority practicing diligently can influence the majority. The individual can indeed transform the collective."

I feel as if I've been in political exile for more than eight years (I live in Ky.) Now that there's a chance to actually change the channel, I do not take lightly threats to that chance.

Surely our majority can transform the opposition's minority. Transform. Not out maneuver, overwhelm or fight. Organize, develop a voice that can be heard, smile, remain calm and use loving speech.

It seems I've heard that plan before. It got a president elected. I plan to be in the group that can support him and each other in community, that can "call on the seeds of patience, understanding and compassion" within and not be hooked into old, familiar ways of conflict and combat.

I will need my headphones until the Organizing for America community gathers.

Doing Good. Together.

49 days! (My car had 1" of ice)

Fw: Life In the Turn Lane

2009-01-17T19:10:00.001-05:00

Fingers of Creation

Arise, shine; for your light has come...

Isaiah 60:1

Y'all come! This is what I and most of America have been waiting for: a national party only two days away! More than a year ago James Carroll had suggested that if Obama were elected he should have a People's Ball to signify a political change of direction Much of Tuesday's festivities in Washington D.C. and around the country - hold that promise. In fact a group of NGO's are bringing 1,000 disadvantaged people to a hotel on Pennsylvania Ave to celebrate. This is not just the Inauguration; it's the birth of a new era. An exhalation of stifled hopes. We've made it we're here!

Literally, I know Obama is not the messiah. I know that Isaiah is not referencing him, but HIM. But the language is just too much to resist:

Nations shall come to your light,

and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Your sons will come from far away,

And your daughters shall be carried...

Isaiah 60:1

Isaiah's spirit resonates with me this inauguration. Sometimes, like the fingertips touching on the Sistine ceiling we touch the creative life force. It's not only Obama, the man, that makes all this real it's a perfect storm where our times and our history economic and social - our people and our government have come together to create this evolutionary moment. The light that shines through we did not create, we just bask in it. I think it's called incarnation.

So I'm ready for the new dawn already here in the Obama Team's communications. Their Economic Plan video* shows more women both black and white - than men (white or black)). In fact Lawrence Summers, the quintessential middle-aged, white male "expert", made the new generational/gender shift all too apparent.

Slowly, slowly we're edging closer to understanding our experience of the human condition in human terms, which to me means in theological, faith, biblical terms. Even rationalist, conservative David Brooks sees a bigger picture. Talking about those who've relied totally on the rational wisdom of The Markets, he says:

...each person's mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. [A] largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant. Context which stimulus triggers which response matters a lot. David Brooks, "An Economy of Faith & Trust", NYTimes, 1-15-09

It certainly does. How could people forget that we are mind, body and spirit? What on earth do people think is in the Bible if not the"panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy"? What do people think Jesus' ministry was about?

David's come part way incorporating mind, body, spirit by recognizing that "... an economy is a society of trust and faith". Uh huh! My biblical concordance shows a gazillion references to the faith and trust qualities he's just discovered. If this keeps up we may one day hear about justice and love in the mainstream media.

No matter our evolutionary track; to me this inauguration is our national, spiritual Hajj ( the journey to Mecca our Muslim friends take):

a person who performs Hajj properly 'will return as a newly born baby [free of all sins].' The pilgrimage also enables Muslims from all around the world, of different colors, languages, races, and ethnicities, to come together in a spirit of universal brotherhood and sisterhood to worship the One God together." Council on Islamic Education

May we all return from the touch of Tuesday's historical significance as newly born citizens, enabled to come together in a spirit of universal brotherhood.

Ah! But there's still that human "panoply" again. Out of the corner of my eye I see those on the fringes of our national celebration who will not be celebrating those (mostly white men) who line up in huge numbers to buy guns, those who have rejected science, those who put fear in place of trust and faith. Jesus had something to say about them too and about our reaction to them. Oh yes! Isn't it that we're all part of the human family; we're all "in"; there are no strangers? Rick Warren and Gene Robinson? Hmmm. Our evolution may take longer than Tuesday.

Our economy may need a re-do as well as a bailout. Our government will certainly need good decisions as well as good will. As for us? I think we need to keep the faith. As Isaiah tells it:

Your people shall all be righteous...

They are the shoot that I planted, the work of my hands

so that I may be glorified.

The least of them shall become a clan,

And the smallest one a mighty nation;

I am the Lord;

In its time I will accomplish it quickly.

Arise, shine!

Doing Good. Together.

2, I say 2 days!

*Barack's Economic Plan video: http://change.gov/plan:

¬¬¬ I needed a tissue to watch Born Again American video featuring All Saints Episcopal Choir (Pasadena): http://www.bornagainamerican.org/

Freedom To Fear

2008-11-01T18:23:00.001-04:00

Freedom To Fear

This is the "fall back" weekend resetting our clocks to standard time and, getting ready to reset our national clocks to we know not where. Gail Collins (NYTimes) said she wished she lived in her native toss-up state, Ohio, instead of Democratic New York so that her vote would really count. Gail, it's exhausting to be so important. Like a surfeit of Thanksgiving dinner, I really cannot take any more "importance". I'm full; my political plate overflows and I can't' yet get up from the table to take a nap.

I have yet to hear much discussion about what I experienced while canvassing. I know, I know, generalizations aren't true in every instance however, they come from enough specific experience to create the generalization. Here's mine: this is an election, a war really, between hope and fear. People who hold onto growling Dobermans, barking Boxers while they open their doors by inches advertise fear to me.. What is it about this part of the country's heritage that so many people should be so fearful so closed? Or that these people can be so easily baited by McCain/Palin's rhetoric?* Their palpable fear makes me afraid I don't much care for their dogs, either. I hear gun purchases are up, including Uzzis, which one buyer said he doesn't need for hunting, he needs it for self-defense from me and my ilk, I guess.

Yep, we people of hope certainly are a threat to those who want to hang onto fear. When I see the tens of thousands of people at an Obama rally, I see hope. They, too, may be 'mad as hell', but, if they're like me they want to lay down that anger and move forward together, civilly; they know there's another way and that we're confident enough to find it given the chance. A woman farmer in Missouri said on NPR, "I hope for a president who will give me hope that we can have hope." At the same time, if the economic apocalypse happens, she's preparing to barter her farm produce in order to live. What is the matter with us? The fatal condition of being human?

I'm reminded that Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly, thinks our system of government, our constitution, is unique, that it can embody a way forward for all of us. This week I watched the biography of Lyndon Johnson and the unsettling times of the 60's and the Viet Nam War. It seems we-the-people take to the streets to oppose war - then; and to gather for hope - now. Pretty good reasons to march, I think.

William Greider, in The Soul of Capitalism, thinks we could even remodel our economic system so that it could work for every one. Greider says,

America capitalism is not going to be refashioned by copying the collective social obligations invented in German, Japan or Sweden. The U.S., more likely, will solve these conflicts in its own distinctive terms or not solve them at all.

Our economic collapse lets us see what the "not solve them at all" picture would look like and that seems to have gotten our attention. My fearful friends call the solution "socialism". It seems not to have occurred to most of us that John McCain, champion of free enterprise and free markets, is a product of "socialism" the government (WE!) has paid for his family's support (his military father and grandfather), his education, his professional training, health care and his current living wage. Governor Palin's state, with no income tax, sends $3000+ to every man, woman and child every year as part of Alaska's deals with the oil companies. No wonder the McCain/Palin team has the security to feel so free!

Me thinks they and their followers protest too much; that, maybe, they represent the anxiety and fear that can come with irresponsible freedom, not enough internal stability like small children whose parents have abdicated.

Wherever it comes from I agree with John Dean*:

...the fact that the pre-election polls are close ...shows that many Americans either do not realize where a McCain/Palin presidency might take us, or they are happy to go there. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, for there is only one way to deal with these conservative zealots: Keep them out of power.

"The Evidences Establishes, Without Question, That Republican Rule Is Dangerous", 10-31-08 Common Dreams

I really must get a grip, here. Surely, like the psalmist who fears, I can put my trust in God, but unlike the psalmist I have additional alternatives I can participate in governance and I can help organize a voice that counters the prevailing messages of fear.

Well, Gail, there are other advantages to living in a toss-up region. It pushes one toward extreme measures - like becoming a responsible, vigilant citizen.

Do The Doing. Together.

80 days!

*A must read: John Dean's article and answer to the "why": http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/31-5

To the Desert

2008-10-18T20:26:00.001-04:00

To the Desert...

It's amazing to me how adaptable we humans are. We can go from complacency to horror to humor in a flash. Here I was, daring to look at my most recent financial statements and actually laughing instead of crying as one of the Daily Show's "reporters" reminded us to stock up on fire in order to survive our economic tsunami. We will need it to fend off the marauders. Hmmm!

Thanks goodness for humor. It salves the pain and fear, puts things in perspective and, it seems, is a strategy of last resort. What else can we hapless citizens do but find solace where we can and canvass of course.

Paul Krugman rarely makes me laugh, but I'm thankful for him nonetheless; his Nobel award from Norway lends credence to his economic reflections. At least here's one person we hapless citizens might be able to rely on. Which reminds me: Just how, exactly, did we become so hapless ? luckless, unfortunate? (courtesy Webster's)

We come by it honestly according to historian Barbara Tuchman who wrote a book, The March Of Folly (from Troy to Vietnam) . Tuchman believes our historical folly has been to consistently think up and live out policies contrary to our self-interest. Apparently we are driven to shoot ourselves in the foot, all the while claiming we're saving the world from some dire threat or another. Contemporary writers say this explains "why it was impossible for skeptics, doubters and more scrupulous analysts to stop the ideological drive behind the invasion of Iraq." Speaking of policies that are not in our self-interest, how about "the mistakes" creating Wall Street's debacle?

To me all of this is the congenital battle between hubris and wisdom. Hubris is defined as overweening pride, self-confidence, arrogance the strut of the 2 year old who thinks she's a match for someone twice her size. Wisdom would recognize the folly of hubris; wisdom is knowledge and how to use it, discernment, judgment; and, not something we are hard-wired for.

So, thanks Paul Krugman you are a breath of wisdom in this whirlwind of hubris. Another anchor of wisdom, for me, is George Soros. His explanation for our economic troubles makes eminent sense to me: that "market fundamentalism" is to blame the hubris (my word) that makes some people think markets are infallible, that booms and busts are inevitable - as if fallible human beings did not have anything to do with the decisions that make them work. Soros says that our human penchant for certainty for fundamentalism makes us look for 180 degree solutions: if this doesn't work, let's try the opposite - which repeats the whole unworkable, boom/bust process. It's like the new age adage: wherever you go, there you are.

O.K. Here we are more lost than we've been in generations. Erik Erikson may have some insight into our predicament and some pointers toward wisdom. He says our lifespan has stages where we resolve particular existential questions. Erikson says that in the last stage of human development, from approximately 65 years to death, we resolve the psychological tension between integrity and despair; life is bounded by death, our concerns turn toward what survives us.

To me that's an implicit theme of our country's current spasm a clash between integrity and despair. If life's goal is to shake off any restraints that keep me from getting more stuff then obstacles impeding that goal bring on despair. If, on the other hand, I can get my act together and see my connection to the future, I can create a life-plan of integrity.

It looks like we don't have to wait till age 65+ to work on this inner conflict which morphs into public policies. Jesus did it early on in his ministry. The Spirit led him to the wilderness; there he stayed, contemplating the spiritual dilemmas offered to him - between immediate power and satisfactions and ultimate concerns. His conclusion "it takes more than bread to really live".

So, I propose a trek to the wilderness. As a country we seem to be in a desert of spirit as well as psychological despair; contemporary voices of temptation hubris keep us from thinking about life bounded by death, of concerns about what might survive us; they stand in the way of acquiring wisdom.

What is certain is that something will come after.

Something will come after this interminable presidential campaign and its depths of fear and pandering;

more questing after stuff or concerns and sacrifices for the planet and seven generations of grandchildren?

Something will come after this administration's manipulations and machinations;

policies that are 180-degree knee-jerks or thoughtful options emerging from wise consensus?

Something will come After Us.

The sign I see says -

Desert à

Do the Doing. Together.

94 days!!!

Aspirin Anyone?

2008-10-04T19:10:00.001-04:00

Aspirin Anyone?

Thanks Joe and Sarah! I don't think I could have taken one more train wreck. I'm developing campaign-itis I need to take two aspirins and go to bed until November 4. To be interested in this campaign is to subject oneself to unexpected disquiet not to mention disgust. But, I do need to say since I've not heard it many other places Sarah Palin did not disprove her incompetence by her debate "performance" she proved she can memorize a script and repeat it endlessly no matter what's actually happening. If that isn't like someone who lives in the White House, I don't know what is.

I should have had her skill when, as an intercollegiate debater I gave up in frustration precisely because I did know what was happening, and I also knew I had nothing at the ready to answer the points of my opponents about disarmament (the debate topic). I found out sitting down is against the rules and totally flummoxed the judges as well as my debate partner; my tears didn't help much either. (In my defense we later went on to win a debate tournament at the University of Nebraska). So, Sarah, there's hope for you.

I want someone as a leader who not only knows what's happening, but has something at the ready to deal with it. But most of all I want leaders who have values beyond their own personal salvation and pocketbooks; who understand we can't build consensus, let alone a future, with economic figures and fear alone.

Apparently I'm in the minority or else the media consensus would not go against Barack every time he tries to go there. When he hits his stride connecting what he wants to do and what the country needs with the whys of eternal values, American ideals and the consensus that is necessary, the pundits hit him over the head for lack of specifics and hit their delete keys.

It's the unedited Obama bits on CSpan that bring me to tears - the Roosevelt stuff about fear and coming together, about how this country has met the challenges of women's suffrage, the depression, world wars, space exploration, civil rights. Barack reminds that it has only been when we reached consensus that we were able to move from chaos to creativity to action on ideas that were indeed scary at first. And, that this creativity is what America is about. Now, why on earth should editors slice that out?

Maybe it's too powerful; maybe people would actually think about the connection between Wall Street's collapse and the economic philosophy/ system where money is first; where we've been conditioned to believe it's numbers in credit-default swaps, hedge funds, and 401K's, not people, that matter. Maybe we would agree with theologian Harvey Cox who, in 1999, wrote a piece in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Market As God".

"...there lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology, which is comparable in scope, if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth.

...The apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God. In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market...

...The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament, not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals."

Even though I know better, it's very, very hard to think outside the economic-political box we've all been crammed into to remember there are other ways and other values than Wall Street's . (Think Norway). It's especially hard to keep more than one thing in mind: the facts of what's happening and the premises on which the facts are based and the values I hold.

The Sojourner's Principles and Policies for Christian Voters helps balance the emphasis: For example, I will try to remember that

"The Bible teaches that societies should organize so that all members have genuine access to the resources needed to live a decent life and provide for those who are unable to care for themselves."

I'm looking for our current economic debacle to provide opportunities, not only for green energy, but for policies that rearrange our fundamental economic priorities. A consensus could be built around these ideas....but, first we'd have to put them at the top of our own priorities and work to organize others. And, in my wildest fantasies, I see us creatively building an alternative, people-resources-first economy. Dream on, I know.

So, between neighborhood canvassing and recuperating in the sun, I'll take my two aspirins, pull up the covers and dream my dreams until Nov. 4.

Do the Doing. Together.

108 days

Fw: Life In the Turn Lane

2008-09-20T16:44:00.001-04:00

Dilemma and Denial

"So, where do you live?" the interviewer asked.

"On a ledge under the roof of U.S. Bank Arena, " he answered.

"Whaaat!!!???" A ledge of the Arena?!!! struck the gong in my head.

A regular guest at our church's weekly dinners, D. graciously told his story to a group struggling with the justice implications of our U.S. health care system. It goes without saying that D. does not have health insurance, nor, apparently, does he have positive encounters with emergency room personnel. Then we heard tales from the real world of home-health care told by a retired home-health provider. That did it! I found my rebel energy: This Is Unacceptable!

That may be the feeling; but feelings don't create much change. Then a group considered the question, "Do you want to live in a world like we've had for the past eight years?" Of course not. We were saved by the clock before we had to consider Then What?

More and more the wars-that-have-always-been are coming out of the shadows. We've known about the race war, of course, but now we're seeing bits of reality that have been so deep in the shadows of our denial that we don't yet have names for them. Put them all together and it looks like Civil War II.

- "real" people* vs. "elites"

- our psychological shadows vs. our higher ideals

- government-as-helper vs. government-as-hurter

- fundamentalist vs. progressive theological views that underlie all political decisions.

One of my denials is to ignore the size and thinking of the group who sees the world through the other end of the telescope. Danuta Pfeiffer convinces me this is a war. She was the co-host of the 700 Club (Pat Robertson), 1983 to 1988, and resigned because of this:

"They (listeners to 700 Club) wanted to know how to live, how to operate on a daily basis,... They wanted every type of emotional, spiritual and physical information. We had this kind of authority over their lives. They abdicated their hopes and lives to us because we spoke for God." "For Palin, It's a (Christian) Man's World" by Chris Hedges, Common Dreams, 9-15-08

No, they abdicated because they lacked opportunities to develop inner resources.

To me the biggest denial of all is that I and many progressives don't see ourselves as contributors to these wars. I'm a member in good standing of The Mea Culpa Corps: comfortable in the middle ideologically and economically; feeling we've been acted upon; acutely observing and commenting on this whole scene; vulnerable to Palin's platoon who "...take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite." David Brooks, ,"Why Experience Matters", NYTimes, 9-16-09.

Here's the Corps' dilemma: We want things to be different and we want to stay in the safe middle without doing different things. Now, in the Corps' defense we're smart enough to see that individual actions have very little effect in resolving our cultural (and military) wars and we don't yet have any collective, collaborate structure in which to act. So we're stuck. Frustrated, angry, fearful and stuck. Talk about unacceptable!

The Corps' responsibility for the governmental-economic debacle is that we've known for years and years that greed and irresponsibility are not the way to run responsible institutions. And we've known that a system based on greed and competition will not likely put human needs first. But I know those dividend checks and stock appreciations have come in handy. I'm addicted. Maybe our practice in coping without electricity this week prepares us for future "coping without", courtesy of Them who act upon us.

My hope lies in the ingenuity, creativity, earnestness and skill of this Corps, once we call a meeting and begin to get organized. Surely we have the ingenuity to build the road to somewhere; we even have the tools. As it turns out we also have an agenda of common good and shared values; we just don't know it. Yes!Magazine has compiled a Purple Agenda: Is this heartening or what? Here's a sample:

67% of us favor public works projects to create jobs

65% believe same-sex couples should be allowed to marry or form civil unions

70% support restoring habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees

64% believe government should provide national health insurance ` coverage for all Americans.

87% support rehabilitation rather than "punishment-only" criminal justice system.

80% favor undocumented workers staying and applying for citizenship

The Purple Agenda seems made for the MCCorp. I know it gives me courage to speak out, knowing there are more "me's" than I thought. See!? I'll say. I'm not the only one who thinks homelessness, poor health care, broken government and a failing economy are Unacceptable!!

Unacceptable ....but not yet hopeless.

Do the Doing. Together.

122 days

*Purple Agenda: http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2836

Think piece on how the people of the country have changed positions and propositions: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/opinion/17mellman.html?ref=opinion

Life In the Turn Lane

2008-07-20T10:30:00.001-04:00

Our Country, As It Could Be

Integrated, diverse crowds in Cincinnati are not exactly an every day event. So I was doubly thrilled to stand with thousands of us on Fountain Square this week to watch Obama's speech to the NAACP (even though I got there too late for the "Yes! We Can".) Blocks away at the Convention Center, he couldn't hear our shouts and cheers but we could. And, to me, that's the point. As he said, we have work to do, none of the big ideas will happen without us all of us. Now I'd like to see the picture of the thousands of us black, white, brown, with the caption: This is what Cincinnati looks like! Then, maybe we could hold onto the image that it's us. We all of us  who are the ones who can.

Something seems to be happening. Themes of citizen dissent and the life potential of groups have been on my mind. Not only do they manifest in this Fountain Square experience, there's evidence that others feel it too, that our hopes and dreams are merging with reality.

A business writer in the Cincinnati Enquirer has come up with an "invention" which owes its birth to the necessity of Ohio's economic condition. It's a 'yes, we can' kind of proposal. John Eckberg's idea:

"Ohio should move immediately to get those auto workers back on the job those executives back in offices by producing the nation's first-ever state-backed automobile and create the ultimate Green industry for our state." Op-Ed, Cincinnati Enquirer, 7-14-08.

Hooray! This has the energy of both dissent and new group life. It's We The Peopleⁿ. It beats Anheauser- Busch with a Belgian twist.

I think I get it; but maybe I don't. America's appetite is bigger than its purse, so it borrows money from China et al to fund a war, etc., American government (that's us, isn't it?) "bails out" failing home owners, businesses and banks. With what? Money borrowed from our current lenders? So who owns what? And! Why do people in financial trouble look to "the government" when they have need for bailing? That must mean people do rely on "the government". So, then, why shouldn't we the government - make the decisions in the first place so we don't end up where we are now? The each-man-for-himself system seems to have a few flaws.

We have a we-the-people system already, but it works so well few of us think about its potential. Eckberg says:

"...it works pretty well in Hamilton [OH] where a publicly owned utility company keeps rates low. Government does a great job sometimes. Turn on a spigot, water comes out. NASA put people in space. Letters get delivered everyday. Streets get paved. Firefighters save lives. Police come when 911 is dialed."

As if that's not enough good news, I'm discovering a scientific explanation for our we-ness that puts it beyond just a progressive political point of view. The principle is coherence. Here's the quantum physics description but it sounds mightily like a people phenomenon too:

"...subatomic particles are able to cooperate. [They] not only know about each other, but also are highly linked by bands of electromagnetic fields, so they can communicate together. They...begin resonating together. ...they begin acting like one giant wave and one giant subatomic particle. ...Something done to one of them will affect the others." Lynne McTaggart, The Field.

Of course there's much, much more. But, it makes sense to me that we are each a piece of a greater whole, that we affect the whole and the whole affects us and that we exist within a "field" that allows this to be possible.

It also makes sense to me that this is scary stuff to the reductionists who see the world as isolated bits, who have little sense or experience of the possibilities of "we". David Brooks and the die-hard Hillary-ites come to mind. If the world is separate bits, each fighting for its place, then domination through power makes sense. To me this is a really, really lonely point of view, and it's beginning to look like it's also scientifically unsound.

Perhaps we humans are in process moving from our historical understanding of how the world works into a period of connectedness; in this early 21^st century we seem to move forward with the shell of Newton on our backs; no wonder it's a struggle.

I'm ready to shed my shell, resonate with others and see what we could do together. Maybe build a green car? a "Buckeye" for instance. Assure health care for all? Compassionate elder care? Maybe even alternatives to war.

A while back my question was, Who? We? A People?

Fountain Square and Mr. Eckberg offer an answer:

We are. And, God willing, maybe we can act like it.

Do the Doing. Together.

193!! days

Life In the Turn Lane

2008-06-07T19:14:00.000-04:00

Look and See

The signal in the turn lane is finally green or maybe just flashing amber. To me Obama's nomination says the idea of community wins over our Hillary brand me-first ethos . It also says we have a long way to go before that seed of community takes root. Surely a campaign team that can figure out how to win the nomination through the rules of delegate counts will know how to run a presidential campaign and administration that will help our country see the U.S. as US.

For me this long, circuitous primary struggle has emphasized one of psychologist William Glasser's precepts watch what people do in order to understand what they're really about. It's a difficult learning.

Just like the media, I want to believe what people say. I want to believe they will actually do what they say. It takes more times than it should for me to "get it" they ain't necessarily going to do what they said. I'm now convinced I need to watch more and listen less. Like the weather report; I could look out the window once in awhile.

George Packer of the New Yorker is a great teacher of "watch more". Entitled "The Fall of Conservatism", his article in the May 26, 2008 copy revisits the last 30+ years of our political landscape. He reviews how the rise of Republican rule, policies and ethos came to be, how what we've heard, lo these endless years, was not what they were doing. And for me, how I didn't pay enough attention to what I saw. Apparently, the polarization we've experienced was deliberate, created! and not necessarily true. Speaking of Nixon, Packer says:

[in 1968] Nixon's "administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many and the noisy, elitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few."

According to Lincoln Chafee, Dick Chaney offered this battle plan once George Bush was "elected":

"We would seek confrontation on every front...The new administration would divide the nation into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us."

Against theTide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President.

I don't recall hearing this as an official administration policy, but it certainly is what they've done. And what they've done was there for all to see. Millions of us just didn't, and don't, want to believe that what we've seen is all there is. As Packer points out, politics has been more important to this administration than governing. I saw that, but, surely, I thought, someone is working on solutions to some of our problems and we just weren't aware of it. Now it's confirmed: they weren't.

Like Hillary's surprise that a Barack Obama could blind-side her ambition, it has taken me a while to realize I've been blinded by the media's penchant for presenting only what they're told. I haven't been focusing on the meaning of what I see - what's really been happening. The emperor truly has been walking around naked. Oh, we of too much faith....

There is looking and there is seeing. I need to look less and see more. I need to use my ears to hear the meaning in Jesus' admonitions about those who have eyes but don't see. My eyes can look at something "out there", note its attributes, identify its form, color, parts and miss the essence of what it is, not see the inter-relationships that have created it. To See, on the other hand, is being in relationship with what I observe acknowledging myself as part of the picture. Its Buddha's lotus flower; its Fredrick Franck's description:

"Is there anyone...who recalls being "looked at",...dismissed as too ugly, too thin, too black...who did not cry out...: "Please, don't stand there looking at me! Can't you see me?" Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing.

Seems to me the Hillary die-hards know how to look. They note her many admirable attributes and the historical significance she represents; they look toward 'a woman' in the White House. From my perspective they don't see her, the relationships that "created" her, the gaps where a "feminized" leader's compassion and collaboration should be.

I may be projecting too much, but I see Barack Obama, most of his supporters and his approach in the stream of fundamental social change. We've lived through the non-violent social change of civil rights and the women's movement. To me the question now is will enough of us see that our problems are linked to "the structure of the social order."George Lakey Will enough of us dig deep enough to admit the meaning of what we see around us?

For now my turn signal flashes amber.

Do the Doing. Together

228 days

A description of a transforming social change experience:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/05/9439/ "Tuesday, Tuesday with Obama in St. Paul" by Bud McClure

Fw: Life In the Turn Lane

2008-06-03T11:45:00.000-04:00

Continuing Creation

"...say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there'

and it will move,

and nothing will be impossible for you."

Matthew 17: 20

I don't know about washing away my sins, but standing in the Atlantic surf tossed up some meditative thoughts that Barack Obama reflected in his recent Iowa speech.

Speaking about change for our country, he said that "if we believe, it will be so." Sounds like the Think System to me. Music Man Harold Hill got the untalented kids of Iowa to play Seventy Six Trombones by thinking they could. Then, of course, there's the Little Engine That Could and Jesus who said, "...if you have the faith of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you." Matthew 17:20. To me all the rest of our political season's hoopla is post-script.

Of course believing the food in front of me will nourish me is one thing; but, I have to eat it for this to be so; in fact, I have to exert the energy to get the food and prepare it before I can eat it. But the doing comes after the believing. If I didn't believe, I wouldn't do; vision drives action.

To me that's the crux of this whole shift into new politics. Obama's words of hope do inspire, but he's operating within a system of "old" politics where the pull seems always toward the powers of the status quo and change is often viewed as violence.

To become a reality major change will require the participation of millions and millions of us citizens not just to get Obama elected, but to participate in the legislative and regulatory work ahead that is the only way the promise will be fulfilled. It looks like a citizens' campaign to me. Barack's vision takes root because he's giving voice to something that's deep in the soul of many of us the will to believe We Can, that We Count, that We Will. Together - Obama + citizens - we are writing the next chapter in the continuing drama of our political process and progress.

And we are making progress. In the lifetimes of generations we've known, slavery has been abolished, civil rights have become law, women have gotten the vote. Hillary was technically right, it took Lyndon Johnson to sign the civil rights bill, but, like all social movements, that was the tip of a very deep and very wide iceberg millions and millions of people worked and marched; some experienced jail, beatings and death. Millions said, We Can and Did the Doing.

That we are making progress shows in the changing attitudes of us citizens reflected in recent polls. The great red-blue divide some try to keep digging seems more a split between the policies of our power structure and the rest of us. Here's a sampling* of how we're changing:

* 69 percent of U.S. voters agree that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" (Pew Research, 2007).

* 54 percent of voters agree that "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt" (Pew Research, 2007).

* 64 percent of Americans would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens (CNN Opinion Research Poll, May 2007).

* 71 percent of Americans think that taxes on corporations are too low (Gallup Poll, April 2007). Katherine Adams and Charles Derber's recent book "The New Feminized Majority"*

Who ever hears about this? This isn't casual conversation around the water cooler or coffee hour, is it? It looks like what we really need to do is take the risk to start talking about this with our families, friends and neighbors, to find out we're not alone, to give ourselves courage to participate in this movement for change.

At a recent workshop I learned that any successful social movement requires four energies: advocates to negotiate with the power keepers; organizers to help people find each other and their strengths; helpers to support people who need help and rebels who draw attention to the issues, who keep the energy up. Gerorge Lakey, Bill Moyer.

It's that "rebel energy" that poses a problem for many of us. Who me? A rebel? Well, if I think about it and allow myself to be honest, yes, that energy resides within me... and many people I know. We may not want it advertised, but it' there.

So, cheering at a rally is one thing a necessary first step but doing the doing to see that We Can becomes We Did is the difference between real and virtual reality; it's Joseph Campbell's "the experience of being alive". It's the acknowledgment that we are tied to the rest of the human family. It's knowing we are participating in creation.

Do The Doing. Together.

235 days

* Reported by Paul Street in Americans' Progressive Opinion vs. "The Shadow Cast on Society By Big Business" May 15, 2008.

Fw: Life In the Turn Lane

2008-05-12T09:06:00.001-04:00

Who, we? A People?

Could there be anything left to say about the presidential primary? Looks to me that it's really not been about either candidate; it's about us. U.S. that is. It's always been about us.

We citizens - old, young, white, black, Hispanic, (native) male, female, rich, poor, educated, uneducated - are the Rorsach of this presidential season. I have a friend, (older, male, black) who always says "We don't know who we are (as a country)." Well, the media has been slicing and dicing the electorate in their attempt to find out; and now I know more about what I don't want to know and less about what I do want to know.

I want to know what "being a people" means. We talk about 'the people of the United States'. There are two pages of scriptural references to "people" in my concordance.

"I will take you as my people and I will be your God." Exodus 6:7

Then there are the references to the People of Israel, People of Judah, People of the Land. Webster's give umpteen definitions of "people".

Being "a People" seems to have had some meaning to our ancestors that our quest for individualism has fogged over. That's what I hear as the message of this presidential primary season we're trying to find out who we are as a people, how all our parts fit together, what our potential together might mean. Perhaps in our civil rights revolution and the rise of feminism we were delineating our "parts" and now we're trying to see what the big picture looks like with those parts included.

Tom Friedman offers a 21^st century description of what he senses is on the move in our land:

"People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America. ...millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others."

Tom Frieidman, "Who Will Tell the People", NYTimes, 5-6-08

To me that's what Barack Obama taps this fundamental yearning to be and serve A People. His life portrays what our people have been able to do create a society that's flexible enough to allow for social mobility and ascendancy and maybe, the beginnings of transcendence over race. Hearing about him makes us proud. Yes! As a people we've done that; we have created the conditions that have made his life possible and he embodies it. When he speaks of these yearnings and accomplishments people cheer; when he speaks of our commonality and potential as A People, tears and goose bumps rise. That's not him. That's us! At those moments we are the people we've been waiting for.

This is a new idea, in many ways a revolutionary idea or, perhaps, the fulfillment of the ideals of our founders; they probably didn't realize fully what they had unleashed with this idea of equality.

So now we are living through this paroxysm of creating the next step in our collective evolution. Humbled by the magnitude and seriousness of our current economic, energy and environmental crises, we're moving away from the hubris of our past where "we saw ourselves as the envy of the ages, as relieved of superstition, and in the highest realms of intellectual enlightenment." Thomas Berry, The Great Work

We're caught in the middle between two trapezes: letting go of our hubris, and getting a grip on what's to come. James Carroll gives a sense of our hubris which created the Iraq War:

"The mistake [of "supermilitarism" by our leaders] is so deeply rooted in American structures of imagination, economy, and government that it isn't even perceived as a mistake by those in power." "The New Immoratility of the Iraq War", Boston Globe, 5-5-08.

We, as a people, won't give this up easily, but the signs are there that we've begun .

Thomas Berry says our creative evolution emerges from the way the universe is organized a balance between the forces of dynamic order in the universe and an openness which created and allows the earth and life to develop. He calls this openness "wildness", those forces over which people have no control; yet, which produce human responses we call creativity. As in our current political reorganization.

Although Berry is speaking of our ecological/climate crisis, it follows as well politically and socially:

"The response we give [to what we can't control] must have a supreme creative power, for the Cenozoic Era in the story of Earth is fading as the sun sets in the western sky. Our hope for the future is for a new dawn, an Ecozoic Era, when humans will be present to the Earth [and to each other] in a mutually enhancing manner."

After all, we are God's people, aren't we?

Do Good. Together.

255 Days. The beach calls. Turn Lane will be back May 31, 2008.

Peace! Or peace

2008-04-12T19:18:00.001-04:00

Peace! Or peace

April 12, 2008

I tend to pay attention when I run into several reminders of the same idea; lately "empire" has risen above the din. General Petraeus, with his shiny 4-starred shoulders, was just one blip. Another was a column headline in my local newspaper which read: "Wright's teachings are part of African-American opposition to empire". And, of course I couldn't miss it in Borg & Crossan's description of the political context of The First Christmas.

I guess I had assumed that empire was just the way the world was one empire after another, a different unit in my social studies texts, more strange names to learn. I seem to have acquired a view of history that's like my mental map of unfamiliar parts of my community bits and pieces disconnected from one another; how to get from one to another can seem like traveling across a black hole. Often I miss the connecting links among all these empires down to the one that's forming me.

But I'm beginning to get it.: Testifying before various Congressional committees on Tuesday, our "employees", General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, subliminally showed me one face of empire. What these hearings told me is that empire is not simply "that's the way the world is" but grows from choices made by people (actually mainly by men) through our millennia think Pharaoh. The choices made by the leaders of empire down through the ages revolve around domination by force my club is bigger than your club, so you must do as I say. No wonder I have difficulty identifying with my empire I'm no good with clubs; no wonder I can't identify with the old politics of our contemporary empire and the candidates who represent it club wielders all.

On the other hand some people, down through those same millennia, made other choices think Moses. Yearning for an end to endless war, for deliverance from Pharaoh they wrote poems, developed worship practices. They used "family" as the metaphor for a society where " God...the father [would] provide equally for all the family of the earth equally meaning enough for everyone always." The First Christmas. All this centuries before Jesus. Ah, my political ancestors have always been there.

These idea of peace and prosperity made up the ancient concept of the 5^th Kingdom the time that would come after four "worlds" of Empire domination. It was this idea of an alternate Kingdom that coalesced around Jesus' ministry in the midst of the Roman influence. Ah! They had new politics too.

I really do get it now and I really don't like it. I don't like it that I've inherited both streams. They have almost become part of the cells of all of us: that war is inevitable, domination is the foundation and that there could be peace and prosperity, except that my club is bigger than yours! B & C give these streams names: peace through victory and punishment vs. peace through justice and equality. And like a morality play there they were both themes embodied in a hearing room in the Capitol: Petreaus, Crocker, McCain vs. Biden, Lugar, Boxer, Obama explaining their choices.

And then there's Rev. Wright's teaching about the black experience in our contemporary empire. I believe my African-American friends when they tell me how weary they are of explaining to us empire people what life in our empire is like, that our empire-society is a choice we've made, that it has consequences we're unaware of. Adam Clark, Xavier University theology professor explains:

"...black Christians... make a distinction between the biblical Jesus (5^th Kingdom) and the American Christ (Empire). The American Christ is the product of the American middle class, a deity who endorses empire and converts his followers into being pro-war, pro-death penalty and anti-abortion."Cincinnati Enquirer Column, 4-8--08.

But, but, but...I'm a nice person, I don't want this to be true; I don't want to make Empirical choices, like supporting war with my money; like passive acceptance of injustice because it's always been there.

The 'corporatization' of our form of Empire and social/ economic justice do not compromise very well. Now (gulp!) we're getting to the nitty-gritty. If I don't want to compromise and I reject Empire what are my choices? To stay awake and try to see the consequences of my choices and to choose active support of emerging justice practices and policies. To learn more about how some countries have rejected empire and institutionalized justice - Scandinavia. To stay away from the Mall how un-empire-ish!, to support our New Politics.

To me this election and our conversations about it are our generation's path toward that 5^th Kingdom. That's good news.

The bad news is I am literally connected to millennia of history and - my choices matter.

Do Good. Together.

262 days

Fw: Life In the Turn Lane

2008-04-09T09:09:00.001-04:00

----- Original Message -----

From: Beverly Jones

Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 7:12 PM

Subject: Life In the Turn Lane

Casting Call

Reflections on Life In the Turn Lane

April 6, 2008

Needing a change from our cultural maelstrom, I went to the ballet. Ordinarily the talent of the dancers, the brilliance of their costumes and sets, the music and their 'out of this world' settings give me a lift from the activities of the 'real world'. Oh, that this were so this time.

The ballet was A Thousand and One Nights. Having had season tickets to the ballet for decades I agree with a friend that this was one of this company's very best productions the costumes, set and dance quality were superb. I've been depressed for a week.

Seeing women as sex objects, killed, banished, and pandering was not my idea of relief, no matter how lovely they looked or danced. I grit my teeth while admiring the skill of adagio partners where the woman-as-object is lifted, positioned, and twirled.; Me Tarzan you Jane. While women in white "burka" like costumes representing women slain by the sultan floated across the stage I saw stereotypes of contemporary middle eastern women and connected misogyny across the centuries.

Maybe it's just me, but we're in such a societal brawl that I easily lose my bearings. It's as if I can't see. Where am I? Where are we going? What's happening to and around us? Am I wrong, aren't the arts and artists major vehicles to struggle with questions like this? I've always thought they give us a communal experience and can sometimes illuminate The Problem. A Thousand and One Nights illuminated the problem all right that we cannot seem to move away from entertainment as distraction at the expense of enlightenment; that we ignore the topics and themes of productions like this and act as if they do not matter and have no relevance. That it's o.k. to use powerful images to reinforce what we already have in our heads and are trying to leave behind.

So here's my suggestion my plea, actually: All you playwrights, choreographers, photographers, artists, composers, writers out there, tell us what you see, hear and feel about what's going on right now in our world and where we might head.

Maybe it's too soon. Maybe we need a little distance before we'll hear from our resident visionaries. But I'm old enough to remember the musical Hair. It opened on February 2, 1962.

"Director Tom O'Horgan said at the time that he saw Hair as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create 'a theatre form whose demeanor, language, clothing, dance, and even its name accurately reflect a social epoch in full explosion.' Hair criticizes and satirizes racism, discrimination, war, violence, pollution, sexual repression, and other societal evils." Rebels with Applause: Broadway's Ground-Breaking Musicals, by Scott Miller,

The non-linear form of this plotless musical was as revolutionary as its music and lyrics they demonstrated community and justice through experimental direction, choreography and costumes. And it was a popular hit. I didn't see it until years after it opened and, still in my fogy Enlightenment mode, remember thinking I liked the ideas....but did they have to do it that way?

Raisin In the Sun, now revived on Broadway, did the same thing when it opened in 1959. A black family's struggle toward the middle class gave to us all insights about black family life, about racism and injustice that we'd been denied until then.

"[Lorraine} Hansberry foresaw what in effect turned out to be a revolution in racial, sexual, and social thought: the reawakening of feminist thought... the surge of African American pride, the "black is beautiful" ideal that would become so important in the '60s; the increasingly confrontational scenes in the old battles over integration and equality of opportunity." Vintage Books Teachers' Guide, A Raisin In the Sun.

And then, of course, there's Bob Dylan, the Beatles' music, and for some of us, Harry Chapin. A few years ago an opera appeared of Dead Man Walking. Now we have Bruce Springsteen and Khaled Hosseini's novels about Afghanistan, Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I've been stretched by all of them.

I'm waiting for the healing touch of some playwright or choreographer who can give us a peek at a new reality: our relationship to creation, transcending racism, shifting power. It's begun: Our local art musem surprised me with Michael Bradford's "Globalization" and "Urbanization" - huge Jackson Pollack-like canvases.

We are dependent upon images, visual and musical, to cohere our experience. A recent healing service in my congregation for a member who was critically ill ended up as a healing experience for all present because of the hymns we sang together. Our personal sorrow and connection became the community's experience because we were given the opportunity - through music. We were different when we left: "Without a doubt we'll know that we have been revived, when we shall leave this place." Sweet, Sweet Spirit.

The Arts matter.

Do Good.Together.

269 days

The Rushing River

2007-01-06T19:13:00.000-05:00

...the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are more various

than the human intellect is designed to conceive.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. NYTimes 1-1-07

It’s the “possibilities of the future” that entice. If the contrast between life way back in 2004-6 and now is any example – I shouldn’t despair for the future of the future. Now from Then is so different, I couldn’t have imagined that we would be where we are. I’m getting used to life in this rushing river of time. To avoid drowning, I hop from one rock to another, ignoring the irritation of getting wet. One rock has more digital gadgets than I literally know what to do with; on another, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and Nancy Pelosi adjust my picture of reality. And then there are my students who have few text books – they carry their information (and often their homework) on their lap tops that link them to the now of the internet. Who knows, I may even get used to spring in January.
And then comes this futurist with some chilling news: “Leo Chalupa, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis, predicted that, by the middle of this century, it would not be uncommon for people to lead active lives well beyond the age of 100. He added: "We will be able to regenerate parts of the brain that have been worn out. So better start thinking what you'll be doing with all those extra years." “No religion and an end to war – how thinkers see the future”, , 1-1-07The Guardian

I already wonder what I’m doing with my “extra years”. What I grope for is something that will hold my interest, fit my values and talents and offer opportunities for participation. Ah! Maybe that’s the key – Service: find something or someone that needs help...and help!
The late President Ford’s elongated funeral this week offered vignettes of service possibilities. My most productive reflections happen when I pay attention to my feelings. NY Times columnist Tom Friedman gives a perfect example:
...suddenly [I] heard the strains of “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” being played on the TV in the next room. When I checked what was going on, I saw President Ford’s coffin being unloaded from Air Force One. I have to admit I got a lump in my throat watching that scene and listening to that stirring melody.” "A Hanging and a Funeral”, 1-3-07

I had a “lump-in-the-throat” moment this week, too. It was at the end of
Tom Brokaw’s eulogy at the service in Washington Cathedral: “Farewell, Mr. President. Thank you citizen Ford.” A melody that stirred and thanks to a citizen who served. I haven’t looked into the deep psychological meanings associated with feelings of “patriotism”, but, surely they have something to do with our hard-wired need and ability to hook ourselves up to something beyond our own immediate lives. Perhaps our integration of those moments into our lives could help to make our Now look like a primitive Then to our children and grandchildren and their kids.

Nancy Peolosi’s breaking of the Marble Ceiling fits: certainly a lump-in-the-throat moment for women. I know my own feelings about the status and meaning of being a woman in these times are deeply buried, but the joy of this moment is real. Those feelings must mean something. It means something that it took a few dedicated women 50 years to secure my privilege to vote; it means something that it took 50 years for women to be seated as delegates in the legislative body of the Episcopal Church – and that it didn’t happen until 1970. 1970?! If we see only the Now, it blocks the vision of the Then.
So, I search for what a new Now might be with the light of lump-in-the-throat moments.. Phoebe Griswold, wife of retired Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, offered a beacon in a speech to the Episcopal Church Women General Convention, 2006. Her advice for the future had long tails from the Then That Was:
If you want to bring about change, you have to understand the systems that surround that change...think systemically. We as women have to speak with one voice...We must seek common ground We have to ask men for their support as we carry out the agendas that we have chosen.” (my italics) A new feminism is not shy about including faith in the conversation.”

Extra years. Service. Lumps-in-the-throat. I agree with James Carroll that at this New Year “...the transitory character of existence shows itself. That fluidity is the revelation that while time is ever flowing by,
what you swim in is eternity.”
Time To Ponder”, Boston Globe, 1-1-07

P.S. Spirit + politics? – or, ‘Hear what the spirit says to the people.’
Bill Moyers “For America’s Sake”:
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views07/0105-26.htm
Joan Chittchister
“Justice Is Done: Why Doesn't It Feel Like It?” ?http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0105-24.htm

Make Way For Ducklings

2006-12-26T14:56:00.000-05:00

But many who are first will be last
and the last will be first.
Matthew 19:30

Here we are again, thanks be to God: a new solstice and a few more seconds of light; a new Christmas with the grace of yet another chance to encounter the vulnerability, the promise of The Babe. Help may yet come from babies – the younger leading the elder, the least among us becoming first. As it often happens, it’s just in time. I will soon have nothing to listen to so disheartening is the unrelenting drumbeat of numbers tolling death and devastation.
Thanks be to God – again – that falling in love with Dick and Jane has sustained my salvation all these years; for me there’s still encouragement to be found in print. This week’s uplift is George Packer’s article in the December 18 New Yorker, “Knowing The Enemy”. He has introduced me to some young(er) people who creatively and confidently wade right into the messes made by some of our elders. David Kilcullen, a thirty-nine year old Australian anthropologist, has skipped over blame and gone right to solutions for terrorism: understand the insurgency. Kilcullen concludes: “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. The get pulled in by their social networks.” Ah, it’s not a war of religions after all – but who you know and who can help you that’s the basis of our turmoil. Now, that seems manageable.

Kilcullen describes the kinds of social connections that lead to terrorism. From those whose grievances germinate in the inefficiencies of their immediate communities – lack of water and electricity, transportation, economic opportunities, etc. to those who have given up on reform, to the minority top tier – Al Qaeda et al, who are “beyond persuasion or conversion”.
As insightful as his descriptions are, the solutions that he and other bright, well-educated young(er) people bring to these crises are breathtaking in their simplicity: Serve the people. Help them get what they need, provide alternatives that work, understand and accept who they are before they become so discouraged they move toward acting out their frustrations. This is rocket science - of the heart - too complicated for our architects of shock and awe, easy in-easy out warfare. As I understand it, “containment” was the front on which the Cold War was fought; it sounds like “engagement” needs to be the front for our struggles with terrorism and where the killing cycle could be broken.
Montgomery McFate, .a cohort of Kilcullen’s, is another anthropologist who has been trying mightily to get the Tin Men of the Pentagon and State Departments to widen their contexts: She says, “The tribal insurgency is the direct result of our not understanding Iraq culture.” The Iraqis who reverted to their tribal allegiances were the ones Mr. Bremer had dismissed. They had been humiliated because of their association with Saddam’s regime, and had lost their jobs and their chances. There’s even better news in this article: our very own military are actually succeeding in parts of Taliban-threatened Afghanistan by helping people find alternatives that meet their daily needs. Empathetic soldiers! This truly is a season of unceasing wonders.

Servanthood – helping the “little people”, those who are usually last - might yet lead us out of our war mode. Their very numbers call us to adapt, to attend to their practical, real life needs.. Instead, our elders strut on stage, orate and exchange medals and praise, and, as James Carroll said, “justify and deny” their responsibility “Rejecting War”, Boston Globe, 12-15-06. But, Kilcullen, McFate** et al have more important things on their minds – cross-fertilizing our categories, integrating real people into policies, understanding and proactively using the flexibility of our information technology. We, of their parents’ generation, must have done something right if we’re gifted with such a new generation as theirs. I’m getting in line for their parade.

That a little baby personifies this human predicament of vulnerability and hope in the midst of upheaval is perfect for me; it’s where I am as a citizen of this world, at this time. I see that the old, familiar ways of authority and power-over no longer work – no matter how hard some try to pound them into the unfamiliar shape of Now. I’m learning that wonderful, powerful gifts await if we will but open them. What would happen to families in conflict, congregations and communities with no alternative but fighting? What would happen to the chasms between those few who have power and the frustrations of the majority who do not - if each of us, in our own communities, become “anthropologists”; if we choose to know – and serve - “our enemy”.

May those of us at the head of the line
make way for ducklings!

* A children’s classic by Robert McKloskey
** They are employed by the U.S. State Department

Holding On-Letting Go

2006-11-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

A friend said I should see the movie Queen because of the purse thing. When she was just QueenElizabeth she carried a purse, but when she was QueenElizabeth she didn’t. I’m not as interested in whatever subconscious meaning that might have as I am in her inner struggle: The Queen vs.Elizabeth, mother and grandmother. It took the drip, drip, drip of Tony Blair’s urgency that she should connect with the millions of people mourning Princess Diana’s death and incessant TV images to pry her fingers from the ramrod of tradition and The Royal Family. And let go she did.

I guess life is like playing poker; it’s hard to know when to hold and when to fold (and I don’t even play poker). Jesus taught it this way: “For those who want to save their life, will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it…”Mark 8:35
For some of us change requires a rainstorm of drips; others are waterproof. Among the waterproofed are some on the Christian right for whom letting go is really, really difficult. Jeff Sharlet in December’s Harper’s, “Through A Glass Darkly” tells a scary tale. It’s their God of punishment, guilt and fear these fundamentalists want to hang onto; their God trumps the God of love and compassion. Their tenet is that God sent us Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, Aids, global warming, and coffins from Iraq as punishment so that we all will come to our senses and return to God’s fundamentalist ways. To that end they are reimagining U.S. history – writing “Christian” text books and supporting homeschooling. That way they’ll be sure their version “wins”. Now that’s holding! Their plan is that we’ll join them and install as our government their kind of theocracy. I can’t wait for the sound-bites of the 2008 campaign.

For Segolene Royal of France, change comes easily. Her Socialist Party found new life by choosing her as their candidate for the next French presidential election. She’s 53 and mother of four. Now, it’s the French pols who face giving up their traditional lives. One of them called her political style, “illegitimate”; the gender jokes persist even though she has the “… university degrees in economics and political science…. She is currently governor of the Poitou-Charentes region in southwestern France.” Featured article on Common Dreams, 11-21-06.
And that’s not all. She let go of the traditional, hierarchical ways of campaigning and governing – Oh, that John Kerry’s handlers had heard about this. She bridges differences rather than creating wedges, “Royal has supporters on both the far left and the right." Just Imagine: She says," I am not afraid of the people," and "I trust the people's collective intelligence." She calls this participatory democracy! Howard Dean called it “You have the power!” I call them both a refreshing shower. She is so popular that President Jacques Chirac’s party (her opposition) is considering nominating a woman. Hillary, take notes please.

Two others who are giving up the old to claim the new passed by this week. One was Atlanta Mayor, Shirley Franklin’s unprecedented meshing of personal and public. She “…disclosed publicly for the first time that she had been molested when she was a young girl.” It was the personal that prompted her to announce a public policy “…that the city would be cracking down on the pimps and johns who prey on under-age prostitutes.” Bob Herbert, “Bought and Sold”, NYTimes, 11-20-06. “Ms. Franklin, who is 61, is trying to jump-start a cultural change that will expand awareness of the widespread sexual exploitation of children in Atlanta and foster an attitude throughout the city that it is not to be tolerated.” Jump start a cultural change? Not tolerate? I’d say she’s the one with an attitude; she brought all of herself to her role, she is real. I am thankful.
The other was Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the micro-credit Grameen Bank revolution to eliminate poverty in Bangladesh. In a speech before the Washington Press Club [CSpan, 11-22-06] He said he came to this idea by giving up traditional economic theories, letting go of entrenched institutionalized banking practice and, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, trusting the people (borrowers) even though they were poor. Later, an interviewer kept probing Yunus for why those with money would willingly lend it for no interest. Yunus patiently explained they will because they are human; that helping poor people change their lives can be just as exciting as making money.

Queen Elizabeth, Segolene, Shirley and Muhammad changed
their minds
… and that changed the world.
Thanks be to our change-ability.

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Growing Beyond

2006-11-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

‘Tis the season to plant the bulbs and wait. It will be five months or so before the curtain goes up on their dazzling yellow, red and white show. I’m one who is out there in January looking for the first nubs of green. I call it faith; there are seasons we can count on – new life succeeds old. So it is no wonder I’m sensitive to the bulbs of national policy we voters planted on November 7. The picture of Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the House, raising hands of victory with the other new house leaders, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn surely signals a new season of leadership. A woman, a white man and a black man! Now that’s an icon of the leadership bulbs I have been looking for.
These images create the future. They seep into our consciousness, it’s what I call drip, drip, drip. Even the religious and conservative right won’t be immune. And wonder of wonders, they’re not just images – they are reality and we will never be the same.
A few days before the election Bill Moyers had said, “The American Dream has had its heart cut out, and is on life support.” To me what We The People have done in the election of Pelosi, et. al has given us a heart transplant, taken us out of intensive care. Maybe we’ll be sitting up and eating solid food before long.

In order to see how our recovery is coming along, I checked out the site of Common Dreams – an anthology of contemporary progressive concerns compiled from current column writers. The editors’ choices of women writers have been running an average of 13-20% of the15 selections posted. Today [11-17-06] it was 40%. I subscribe to the theory that serendipitous events have connections and meanings we may not understand immediately. But here are the titles (and topics) from today’s menu – serendipitous, indeed!

The men wrote titles such as these – familiar to newspaper, magazine and NPR customers:
America Faces a Future of Managing Imperial Decline,
Bad-Ass Democrats: Some of the Most Critical Victories Were Anything but Republican-Lite.'
The New Media Offensive for the Iraq War
The Coming US Withdrawal from Iraq
Dismay Grows Over US Torture School
The Neocons' Last Stand
And the women were concerned with:
Waging Peace,
Nuns' Canned-Food Offer Isn't up to Prosecutor's Palate,
Sources of Violence: We Need a US Foreign Policy Based on Fairness and Justice Toward Iraqis
America’s Election: Daddy’s Swagger vs Mommy’s Care,

Drip, drip, drip! To me that’s how the focus and priorities of our government (and the country’s consciousness) will change. It’s how we can move forward to fulfill our founders’ We-the-People pledge – how we can change the conversation: when we see images that are the reality of what we want. Madison Avenue has known this for decades.
When we have a reality we don’t want, Jung said that the way out is to grow beyond rather than fight against it. This election just did that. To me, having a woman, a white man and a black man as national leaders is growing beyond.. They are the hope that we’ll have different conversations as well as different images. I heard on NPR that a Los Angeles official said the dumping of mentally ill homeless hospital patients back into “skid-row” should prompt a discussion of how we treat the homeless. Duh!! How about what it is we do that creates homelessness? Or, as in Cincinnati – where the city council wants to trade monies to agencies providing human services for more policemen. Violence is a problem, you know. Wrong conversation!

John Dean has a clue for growing beyond in his new book Conservatives Without Conscience . He urges us to understand the phenomena of authoritarianism, of voters blindly following leaders who manipulate and lead for reasons of personal power; of leaders who are amoral, whose only values are themselves, who can only order, never listen. Once we’re aware, maybe we won’t be fooled again, maybe we’ll spend our energy in conversations and conclusions that will support life not greed. Oh, what a beautiful garden those bulbs would grow. The ground has been turned over.

In the meantime I agree with the gentle soul interviewed by his daughters on NPR’s Story Core. He has Alzheimer’s and they asked, “What is your life like now, Dad?” "Well,” he said deliberatively, “I have a really nice life. I get up in the morning….. I go to bed at night… ….and in between….. I have three meals.”

Here’s to Nancy, Steny and James –
so that all of us can have a “nice life”.

Getting The Message

2006-11-15T09:27:00.000-05:00

Thank goodness she didn’t carry a purse. On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi – in the Rose Garden of the White House - just stood there among the highest leadership of our country. Her singular presence among the rows of middle-aged white men around her gave me chills. I had always winced when I saw Margaret Thatcher holding her purse as she stood among the middle-aged white men of her leadership era. That was then. This is now.

Last Saturday, Katharine Jefferts Schori just stood there, too, at the altar of the Washington National Cathedral – instituted as the first woman Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA. Her purple robes prohibited her from carrying a purse; and I can’t imagine that she will ever hold a purse in official photos. Somehow the images of oceanographers and airplane pilots (Katharine) and Speakers of the House (Nancy) do not include purses. And, thanks to them future photos of top church and governmental leadership will at last include representatives – albeit token - of 53% of our population.

David Brooks is right – this election has put a period on the era of neo and social conservative leadership and - what he didn’t anticipate – a period on the historical domination of white men as the only leaders in this country. One female NPR reporter, describing the impact of this new picture of leadership, called it the “mirror factor” – how this change will affect all women, especially the young, as they look at themselves and the opportunities available to them.

All of this seems true to me – but I suspect there will be changes subtler than the shift in numbers; changes and uncharted opportunities beyond the facts that 16% of Senate, 20% of the House of Representatives, and 9% of our Governors will be women in 2007. To me this new-born era seems an answer to Jean Bolen’s Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women and Save the World. Her thesis – known to most women (and many men) is that women care about different things than most men; that men have been socialized in ways that stunt their “feminine” spiritual gifts – just as women have been socialized to ignore their assertive, leadership talents and that we need all of these qualities to save the world.

Marcus Borg reminds that the feminine was used in scripture to personify wisdom and God – the image of Sophia. Borg states

In the beginning was Sophia, and Sophia was with God. …all things came into being through her.
,…Jesus speaks for divine Sophia. Speaking her words, he is the envoy or emissary of Sophia.,..Jesus speaks of himself as a child of Sophia.”Meeting Jersus Again for the First Time.

Bolen says that if the “deep feminine” placed a classified ad in the world’s “Help Wanted” section , this is how the qualities of compassion that are considered feminine (Sophia) might sound. They are the attributes that would apply to most women and some men:

HELP WANTED: …Home keepers for Earth. Must keep premises safe for all. Have concern for children’s need and development, ability to manage resources, resolve conflicts, work collaboratively, ask questions, listen and learn from the experience of others, be empathic, and act with compassion for the benefit of all, including generations to come.

Rev. Frank Griswold, Katherine’s predecessor as Presiding Bishop, put it this way:
“In so many situations of conflict and division throughout the world it is women who, because of their passion for life and the wellbeing of the family, are the peacemakers.”

So, Nancy and Katharine – Go, girls! I’ll be right behind you – as will most women and many, many men. We will all get used to this new leadership style:
When a microphone was not working in one of Nancy’s recent press conferences she said, “I could use my MOTHER-OF-FIVE voice.”; and at another time she told an interviewer, “Don’t mistake my courtesy for lack of a plan.” A “mother’s” voice? Courtesy? These phrases certainly trump the usual sports and war metaphors.

So, we’ll keep working till we reach the tipping point of equal representation and inclusion of compassion and caring in our national agenda; we’ll keep on until that seems “normal”. Bob Herbet tells us what that “normal” might look like:
“…Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, who lives in New York, is due to have Ms. Pelosi’s sixth grandchild at any moment. When Ms. Pelosi’s phone rang early yesterday morning, [Wednesday] an aide had to wake her. “Did we have the baby?” she asked. No, she was told. It was the president on the line, calling with his congratulations “Ms. Speaker and Other Trends”, Bob Herbert, NYTimes, 11-09-06

Babies and Presidents in the same story?

I can get used to that.

What God Saw

2006-11-05T14:56:00.000-05:00

I know. I know already: there’s going to be an election.

And what about that Hubble telescope?!! Now there’s real news. This week NASA decided it will replace Hubble’s aging parts and extend its life so it can go on taking pictures just for me. There’s no art nor photographs that stir me like those pictures of deep space.1 I learned on Science Friday (NPR) that I’m a “Hubble Hugger”. Orion Nebula M42 graces the wallpaper on my computer desktop.

“And God saw that it was good.”
Me too.

For me these pictures undergird an exciting hypothesis of how life got “here” described by Ervin Laszlo in Whispering Pond. The hypothesis is based on contemporary knowledge in physics – black holes, dark matter, string theory, etc.
"[This hypothesis] tells why our universe, born in a “bang” some 15 (or perhaps only 7 or 8) billion years ago, is so precisely predisposed to the evolution of life. It is because our universe came along as part of a perhaps long series of prior universes, unfolding within the enduring womb of an ongoing “metauniverse.” – carrying the “memory” which culminated in life."

Elections? Republicans? Democrats? This is not nearly as exciting to me as this cosmic dance I’m involved in. It’s a great comfort to know that the Cosmic Beat goes on…and on…. Besides David Brooks thinks it’s all over – not the cosmos, but neo-conism:
“We’re about to enter another of those periods without a dominant ideology. It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance. This election is a period, not a comma in political history.”

George Bush’s secretive and declarative method will soon seem archaic — like the silent picture acting style in the age of sound. Instead, voters will look for candidates as interactive as the technology around them. The Era of What’s Next” David Brooks NYTimes 10-26-06

“And God saw that it was good.”

If Brooks is right and this nightmare era may be ending, to what might we be evolving as co-creators of the universe? Bill Moyers brings us back so that we might go forward. In a speech to the Council of Greater City Schools in San Diego on October 27 he reviewed American History. Some excerpts:

To our everlasting shame America nurtured slavery in the cradle of liberty. But, oh, the very idea of it, the vision of it, the potential power of “We, the People” let loose in that brief astonishing span of history was to change the consciousness of the world.

[Abraham Lincoln] was the first American president to recognize fully that democracy requires an economic system in which individuals can enjoy the fruits of their labor, and that the job of government was to keep the playing field level.

Today, the top 1 percent controls 38 percent of our total wealth. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30 fold. Now it is more than 75 fold.

The American Dream has had its heart cut out, and is on life support.

Teach them [the students] there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people.2
“And God saw that it was good.”

Greg Palast has a new book, Armed Madhouse. His work in investigative journalism can be found on BBC Newsnight and The Guardian. Through his meticulous research I now understand why the gas prices fluctuate upward and how deep our deception of Iraq+oil+neocons goes. At the end of the book he says,
“We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

This all came together for me in a workshop on social class I attended last weekend at Pendle Hill, PA, a Quaker retreat center. Half of our group of 30 were students and recent graduates of Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr colleges. We were amazed at the depth of our erroneous assumptions about class and the power of our social roles to control our behavior. We learned, we laughed, we looked in new directions. But most of all I was encouraged. I don’t know what we’re going to “do about it”, but I agree with one of the students who, in our hand-holding concluding circle said, “At least I know 29 other people who will help me work on it.”

“And God saw that it was good.”

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.
Resist

1. Go to http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/galindex.html for your very own pictures
2. “America 101”, November 1, 2006 available on http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1101-33.htm

Fresh Possibility?

2006-10-23T09:49:00.000-04:00

I get it. I get it…. Barack Obama is not running for president! Suddenly he’s “not running” everywhere – Sojourner’s and Time’s covers, Larry King Live, Harper’s Magazine, Diane Rehm Show.. David Brooks (NYTimes, 1—19-06) encourages him to run because he has an “on the other hand” kind of mind. This even-handedness Brooks contrasts with the Boomer mentality – which Obama calls “highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.”
Years of hard work in reconciliation ministries has helped me realize that in real life this big word means something simple: relationships – coming together, being together. Reconciliation is the mission of the church; it leads to forgiveness and a clean slate. It’s revolutionary stuff in our age of competition, division and isolation and it may be Barack’s non-campaign sound bite. . As comforting and seductive as Barack’s conciliatory message is, it comes wrapped in the reality of our red/blue divide – it is only half of our story. So I’m still nervous.
“There are two versions of normal in America, two radically different takes on what our nation means, what we believe and what our democracy should look like in the future.” Brian Mann, Welcome To The Homeland.

Mann builds the case that our least populous states (the geographic center) and the rural population in other states have disproportionate influence in our elections and policy development and they won’t easily take Barack’s bait of conciliation:
“If you treat each senator as representing half that state’s population, then the Senate’s 55 Republicans currently represent 131 million people, while the 44 Democrats represent 161 million people.” journalist Hendrik Hertzberg ,New Yorker-see Molly Ivins, 10-20-06, Common Dreams.

I am a child of The Homeland; I grew up in South Dakota – according to 2000 census it had 9.9 people /mile2; I live in a metro area of 683 people/ mile 2 (NYC density: 24,402 people/ mile2). According to Mann increased diversity, density and pluralism give one a world-view (metro/blue) different from a largely homogenous environment where distance between neighbors reduces the friction of difference (homelander/red).
(U.S. has a density of 31 people/km2; UK, 246 people/km2; Canada 3.2 people/km2). Wikipediia Demographics

So, I’m with the majority who now live in urban areas rather than rural. It’s our metroness that I hear in Barack’s message. The homelanders (who’ve moved to the ex-urbs) are pushing hard to protect their neighborhoods from rapid cultural change, to hold on to the values they've been given by tradition.

"We metros are the ones who have changed – and with remarkable speed. We leapfrogged in a single century from suffrage to civil rights to gender equality and rights for same sex couples. And because urban Americans pay so little attention to their rural cousins, we assumed that homelanders were keeping up. Happily or unhappily, we didn’t care; so long as they didn’t cause a fuss." Welcome To the Homeland.

The enthusiasm that exists for Barack and the hope we project onto him are a terrific lift for me – maybe, I think, reconciliation is actually possible. I worry that we don’t’ have the language and skills to actually do it. Our core values of competition, winner take all, Darwinian survival do not lead down that road. Barack’s position seems a good start at projecting other values, changing the balance of energy with talk about caring, nurturing, cooperation, collaboration, the feminine energy that we all have. It is a balm to the predominate male energy (domination, mastery, competition) that’s bloodied our young men (and now women) and our electoral process for our lifetimes and maybe since forever.
Jean Bolen, Jungian psychologist brings to consciousness the differences between masculine and feminine energy:
“The plague of violence in the home, in street gangs, and by terrorists is a refletion of an economic and social world where Mother as the feminine principle is absent, and no one cares about each person in the human family.”Jean Bolen, Urgent Message from Mother: Gather The Women – and save the world.

Barack seems to genuinely care – he is one sign that tells me we’ve begun coloring a different picture – we seem to be evolving. Maybe the seeds of faith we’d been holding tightly and dared to plant in the 60’s have germinated and Barack is a sprout (he was born in 1961). May there be many more sprouts.
Maybe we metros are the fulfillment of Walter Brueggemann’s Hope Within History: It’s the metaphor of Exodus:
…”.the people groaned. They cried out. They protested. They raged. They brought their common misery to public speech…”

Barack protests civilly, he quietly brings misery to public speech.

“God’s purpose abides in the midst of historical chaos and will
finally work through the chaos to create a fresh social possibility.”
Walter Brueggeman Hope Within History

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.
Resist

Hello Data!

2006-10-17T09:16:00.000-04:00

I’m afraid it’s getting to me; my island of sanity and tranquility shrinks as meaning erodes more and more. It’s the appalling political TV ads that slip through my filter; NPR’s and BBC’s drumming on Foley/Hastert, North Korea, Iran, Darfur. Even the progressive Common Dreams site has become saturated with fearsome facts, counter-facts and speculative strategies. There seems no place to hide from this deluge of data, let alone find support for rational interpretation, and space to grow and prosper.

My professional self says get a grip; you know something about how the brain functions so how can you expect any other outcome? That’s my problem, I do know a bit about the brain-mind-world connections and what exposure to our contemporary culture seems to be doing to us – to me – and without a vote, either.
“For those of us with sight, the information gained through seeing becomes the raw material from which we fashion reality. In turn how we see actually determines the quantity and quality of the information we have available for action..” Beverly Jones, Visual Behavior

Marshall McCluhan: “You become what you behold.” The Mediium Is The Message

Seeing is the sum total of the energy that reaches the brain through the eyes and its association with other parts of the brain. This coordinated brain creates vision – the meaningful visual-space-language world we build from that radiant energy. Our eyes are not simply cameras recording something that exists “out there”. Images of bombings, tanks rolling toward us, starving, wounded children, of competing talking heads – are “information gained through seeing”. They skew our mental visual-space world – our very sense of reality. We are changed.

Buddhists know this:
“Our senses are our windows to the outside world, and sometimes the wind blows and disturbs everything within us. Many of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sight and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and expose our sad, troubled selves.” Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart

Jesus taught –
“For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Mark 8:36
and “My kingdom is not of this world” John 18:36.

This wisdom precedes the modern work in neurology that associates brain structures and functions. Paul MacLean, neurologist, describes one of three levels he’s identified:
“Reptilian brain: It is rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid, it is "filled with ancestral memories". It keeps repeating the same behaviours over and over again, never learning from past mistakes.” Paul MacLean, Triune Brain webstire,
Hmmm! Sounds familiar. The other two levels of brain organization MacLean describes are: cortical: rational and abstract thought and limbic (mid-brain) emotions - this system intricately connects to the cortex. Thoughts and feelings are married and by design can integrate with logic and abstract thought – one mind system.
Rational and abstract thought has been promoted as the keystone of modern thinking; we’re at the top of the food chain, aren’t we? But, my visual-space world (and the violence of the 20th & 21st centuries) tells me we humans have not let the other levels of our brain function lie dormant. - emotion and flight/fight seem to trump logic sometimes.

If you don’t agree (even if you do agree and want to see the future) – check out YouTube – the website Google just bought for $1.68 billion (I say, Billion!). www.youtube.com Keep the three levels of brain function in mind and see what you think. Scary is what I think.

Yes, technology is terrific – imagine taking pictures (movies) with your telephone+ and sharing them around the world. Amazing - and appalling! I guess the rational and abstract cortical thinking energy must have gone into developing the technology - it certainly is not apparent in the content. What I saw proved for me the theory that one’s frontal lobes (judgement) are not fully developed until mid-twenties. If children and youth will be watching this (is there any doubt?) – it’s not hard to guess which part of their brains they will exercise and what behaviors will grow from these seeds. By the way, I heard that Google wanted this site because of its “monetizing” potential – billions more from advertising because this site is the prototype of a whole new wave of “information gained through seeing.” Hold on to your cortex!

Another prototype of the future I stumbled across this week is BBC’s new wave of “citizen journalism”. Spawned by the electronic information technology citizens sent to BBC’s website their own pictures, comments, movies of the July 7, 2005 bombings. Within six hours they received 1,000 photos, 20 videos, 4,000 text messages and 20,000 emails.[pdf Citizen Journalsim and BBC – Google site]. What’s amazing is that they think this is good: “From now on news coverage is a partnership.” Richard Shambrock, BBC World Service,

Goodbye meaning. Hello data.
I think I’ll close my windows.

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.
Resist.

For details of the social-governmental implications of YouTube see: “The Google YouTube Tango” Jeffrey Chester, 10-13-06, The Nation, available on www.commondreams.org - see site:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1013-24.htm

Hello Data!

2006-10-14T17:01:00.001-04:00

October 14, 2006

I’m afraid it’s getting to me; my island of sanity and tranquility shrinks as meaning erodes more and more. It’s the appalling political TV ads that slip through my filter; NPR’s and BBC’s drumming on Foley/Hastert, North Korea, Iran, Darfur. Even the progressive Common Dreams site has become saturated with fearsome facts, counter-facts and speculative strategies. There seems no place to hide from this deluge of data, let alone find support for rational interpretation, and space to grow and prosper.
My professional self says get a grip; you know something about how the brain functions so how can you expect any other outcome? That’s my problem, I do know a bit about the brain-mind-world connections and what exposure to our contemporary culture seems to be doing to us – to me – and without a vote, either.
“For those of us with sight, the information gained through seeing becomes the raw material from which we fashion reality. In turn how we see actually determines the quantity and quality of the information we have available for action..” Beverly Jones, Visual Behavior

Marshall McCluhan: “You become what you behold.” The Mediium Is The Message

Seeing is the sum total of the energy that reaches the brain through the eyes and its association with other parts of the brain. This coordinated brain creates vision – the meaningful visual-space-language world we build from that radiant energy. Our eyes are not simply cameras recording something that exists “out there”. Images of bombings, tanks rolling toward us, starving, wounded children, of competing talking heads – are “information gained through seeing”. They skew our mental visual-space world – our very sense of reality. We are changed.
Buddhists know this:
“Our senses are our windows to the outside world, and sometimes the wind blows and disturbs everything within us. Many of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sight and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and expose our sad, troubled selves.” Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart

Jesus taught –
“For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Mark 8:36
and “My kingdom is not of this world” John 18:36.

This wisdom precedes the modern work in neurology that associates brain structures and functions. Paul MacLean, neurologist, describes one of three levels he’s identified:
“Reptilian brain: It is rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid, it is "filled with ancestral memories". It keeps repeating the same behaviours over and over again, never learning from past mistakes.” Paul MacLean, Triune Brain webstire,
Hmmm! Sounds familiar. The other two levels of brain organization MacLean describes are: cortical: rational and abstract thought and limbic (mid-brain) emotions - this system intricately connects to the cortex. Thoughts and feelings are married and by design can integrate with logic and abstract thought – one mind system.
Rational and abstract thought has been promoted as the keystone of modern thinking; we’re at the top of the food chain, aren’t we? But, my visual-space world (and the violence of the 20th & 21st centuries) tells me we humans have not let the other levels of our brain function lie dormant. - emotion and flight/fight seem to trump logic sometimes.

If you don’t agree (even if you do agree and want to see the future) – check out YouTube – the website Google just bought for $1.68 billion (I say, Billion!). www.youtube.com Keep the three levels of brain function in mind and see what you think. Scary is what I think.
Yes, technology is terrific – imagine taking pictures (movies) with your telephone+ and sharing them around the world. Amazing - and appalling! I guess the rational and abstract cortical thinking energy must have gone into developing the technology - it certainly is not apparent in the content. What I saw proved for me the theory that one’s frontal lobes (judgement) are not fully developed until mid-twenties. If children and youth will be watching this (is there any doubt?) – it’s not hard to guess which part of their brains they will exercise and what behaviors will grow from these seeds. By the way, I heard that Google wanted this site because of its “monetizing” potential – billions more from advertising because this site is the prototype of a whole new wave of “information gained through seeing.” Hold on to your cortex!

Another prototype of the future I stumbled across this week is BBC’s new wave of “citizen journalism”. Spawned by the electronic information technology citizens sent to BBC’s website their own pictures, comments, movies of the July 7, 2005 bombings. Within six hours they received 1,000 photos, 20 videos, 4,000 text messages and 20,000 emails.[pdf Citizen Journalsim and BBC – Google site]. What’s amazing is that they think this is good: “From now on news coverage is a partnership.” Richard Shambrock, BBC World Service,

Goodbye meaning. Hello data.
I think I’ll close my windows.

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.
Resist.

Turn Lane Live! Monday, October 16,
Panera Bread, Hyde Park Plaza, 7:00.
Check out YouTube and bring your editorial comments along!
(See below for astounding detail.)

For details of the social-governmental implications of YouTube see: “The Google YouTube Tango” Jeffrey Chester, 10-13-06, The Nation, available on www.commondreams.org - see site:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1013-24.htm

Hello Data!

2006-10-14T17:01:00.000-04:00

Blowin' In The Wind

2006-10-09T09:17:00.000-04:00

“Bless the Lord, O my soul.
…you ride on the wings of the wind;
you make the winds your messengers.”
Psalm 104:3

Thirty-four years ago I joined with millions in a chorus of hope for those bigoted times and sang Bob Dylan’s, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowin’ in the wind.” This week Jim Wallis, [Sojouners, God’s Politics], didn’t offer a song, but wrote in a letter: “It’s the wind. The winds of change are shifting.” With or without a melody, this is music to my discouraged ears.
In the midst of our cultural storm that has been darker than usual lately -– more dead in Iraq, little girls shot in school, young men harassed by a Congressman – a cool front seems to be moving in, lighter, cleaner air holding a promise that maybe I might be able to take deep breaths again.
Although I wish Jim Wallis’ message could include everyone…. Christians+, I’ll settle for the restricted message: that we Christians need to vote God’s Politics; vote all our values. Wallis’ organization, Sojourners/Call To Renewal, has printed 200,000 brochures, “Voting God’s Politics”, with specific progressive issue positions and concrete things to do regardless of the political party and candidates we might support. You can see it and order free copies for yourself or your congregation through www.sojo.net or 1-800-714-7474. Here’s an opportunity to create the cool front that could blow away the clouds of fire and smog pressing on our heads for over three years.

Although I haven’t read it yet, Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial sounds like a breeze that can help to build a cleansing wind.. In it he reports the administration’s days before the war in Iraq and on Larry King Live said his personal choice for a title would have been Crisis! More important to me than the details of Bush & Co.were Woodward’s responses to Terry Gross on Fresh Air today.. She asked him why there’s more of his personal reactions in this book than his others; his answer: empathy. He identifies with the young people fighting in Iraq because he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War – a war he didn’t understand, didn’t support and a tour of duty he felt wasted six years of his life. That empathy, that emotion, is what generates genuine change according to Peter Senge et.al. We cannot keep repeating our intellectual errors once we get in touch with how we feel about their results. That’s the point of Woodward’s book – that Rumsfeld & Co.have worked very hard not to be in touch with their feelings – that they in fact deny them even as they deny the events we all see - maybe that’s why they deny what we see. Seems to me a force for change requires more of us who are in touch with what we really, really feel than those who deny their feelings and reality.

Just as the weather fronts are interacting “systems” of air pressure, barometric pressure, precipitation, etc., so are all of us and our world. – even our politics. Human beings are organized as systems, physically, socially, cosmically. Each part affects the other parts – all together these adaptable parts create the dynamic whole, the whole is in reciprocal relationship to its surround, its field. So, shifting one part even a little bit, means the other parts cannot stay the same, the field shifts and in turn shifts us. Some of us resist this shifting, this rearranging of parts. I have a greeting card that says, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.” Butterflies live on the wind. For them staying in the cocoon is death.
Bill Moyers describes a butterfly dilemma – stay in the cocoon and wait for a leader or fly into the wind:
"The only way to counter the power of organized money [in Congress] is with organized and outraged people. Believe me, what members of Congress fear most is a grassroots movement that demands clean elections and an end to the buying and selling of influence—or else! If we leave it to the powers that be to clean up the mess that greed and chicanery have given us, we will wake up one day with a real Frankenstein of a system—a monster worse than the one created by Abramoff, DeLay and their cronies. By then it will be too late to save Lincoln's hope for "government of, by, and for the people." Bill Moyers, “Lincoln Weeps”, October 3, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

The wind – the spirit – is our messenger the psalmist reminds. I think I’ll start singing again – do I hear a chorus forming?
“The answer my friend, is blowin’ In the wind,
the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Eight days till Turn Lane Live!
Join us on Monday, October 16, 7:00 p.m.
Panera Bread in Hyde Park Plaza, Cincinnati, OH

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.

Doublethink

2006-10-01T19:40:00.000-04:00

October 1, 2006

Two years ago I cautiously pulled into the turn lane, confused and depressed by the traffic of the 2004 presidential election and its aftermath. How could we be sliding down the slippery slope of tax cuts that hurt the poor, how could 15-20 of our young people be killed every week in a war that wasn’t a war? After the first Bush “victory” in 2000, I thought maybe the voters hadn’t actually heard the plans to privatize their world. But after living it for four years, after hearing a counter message of the 2004 primaries (You have the power!) they still wanted more Bush?
Unbelievable. An aberration, I thought. We all want peace, don’t we? How has all this become the policy and practice of my country? And the beat goes on with this week’s “Bush Victory” in Congress. (For details consult: “Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)” by Molly Ivins; “Rushing Off a Cliff: Antiterrorism Bill on Detainees, Geneva Conventions”, NY Times editorial, 9-28-06, both available on Common Dreams.org, 9-29-06.)

I have gingerly pulled my head out of the sand these past two years and like a new-born thrust into the lights of a strange, new world, tried to make sense of the unfamiliar images and actions coming at me. George Lakoff, linguist, has come along to help with a new book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea. He lends credence and detail to what I’ve observed and puts it in succinct and still shocking context. He explains that the cultural water I’ve been swimming in has been the traditional progressive values of freedom that have evolved over our 200 year history: expansion and inclusion: of voter rights, better jobs and worker protections, public education, civil rights, science, public health, consumer protection, access to capital, freedom from colonial rule around the world. Lakoff reports that Bush’s use of the word “freedom” in his second Inaugural Address “…called for the reversal of the notion of freedom introduced by President Roosevelt – freedom from want and fear. “ Lakoff quotes a right-wing commentary on that speech:
“Bush’s speech should be read as a reply to FDR and an attempted reversal of the process he started domestically, while affirming its international presence but bypassing the United Nations FDR supported.” Ken Masugi, Claremont Institute

Adding to this shock, Lakoff goes on to analyze the language used by “radical conservatism” and its effects on the rest of us. His thesis is
That there is a deliberate strategy to dismantle the progressive agenda of this century –– to literally wind the cultural clock backwards.
That we are all affected by their language, The Message. Cognitive science can explain how their communication tactics actually change our brains. i.e. the word freedom. With enough repetition of a new meaning our brains incorporate it and, presto, its 1984 all over again.
That progressives, political and religious, have not been aware of the unconscious motives for their views and strategies – empathy and compassion.
I had adopted Lakoff’s original frames of the cultural Nurturing Parent (progressives) and Strict Father Model (radical conservatives) as explanations for the differences in views of government and policy. But now, if we don’t want to go backwards, if the way we think is being shaped by the radical conservative messages, if empathy and compassion are our values, how do we step over this glitch in our history? Lakoff says, we can’t stop it, if we don’t see it. Shake off the sand.
Thank goodness, others do see it and are doing something. I heard that Sandra Day O’Conner has convened a “think tank” meeting of leaders from all aspects of government to consider the primacy of the judicial system, particularly the Supreme Court, because of her concern that we are losing our balance. Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) in October’s Harpers urges those in government who have papers in their safes that could bring to light information that could help stop the war to step forward as he did during the Vietnam War. Progressive religious folk and supporters were arrested around the country Wednesday for sitting in at the Capitol and in Congressional members’ local offices (including Cincinnati) to promote the Declaration of Peace.
Garrison Keillor warns the world:
Good morning, Iraq and tortured prisoners hijacked to Syria and the war crimes committed by our own officials. One can escape at the movies or in Monet's garden, but these crimes won't stay hidden. There were photographs of Abu Ghraib. There are cell phones everywhere. People are taking photographs of almost everything nowadays. “Mixed Feelings about Snap Judgments, Depending on the Frame”, Common Dreams.org. 9-29-06.

We have the hope of the mid-term election prospects ahead of us and as Lakoff says,
“Jesus was a progressive and to follow in his footsteps
is to live progressive lives.
That’s the good news!”

Join us at Turn Lane Live, Cincinnti, Ohio
Monday, October 16, 7:00 p.m.
Panera Bread in Hyde Park Plaza

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together

Wait A Minute!

2006-10-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

September 21, 2006

Picture this cartoon: Paul Noth, New Yorker, 9-18-06
A herd of cat-like figures are hurtling off a cliff with the caption:
“Wait a minute. We’re lemurs! Lemurs!”
And this is the week that is – unfortunately. No matter that the legend of actual lemmings [small tundra rodents] rushing to the sea is a creation of Disney Inc.[White Wilderness, 1958) – it has endured because of its truth: rash, out-of-control behavior can lead to impending doom. I have friends who’ve sworn to pull me back should I ever be headed for the cliff’s edge, lemming style. Oh, that some of the players on our world’s stage this week should have such friends.
What to do with the media’s focus on out of context remarks by Pope Benedict and Hugo Chavez – with up close and personal looks at the Muslim rage turned toward the Pope, the men rioting in Hungary, the Thai military reassuring citizens in Thailand that their coup is for their country’s own good, with arguments in our own Congress for and against torture…torture! No! my innards tell me. No! I’m not going over this cliff: Wait a minute! We’re lemurs! We’re lemurs!
And then a fellow lemur appeared on the Diane Rehm show, 9-20-06. Author Da Chen talked about his childhood in China during the Red Revolution as the context for his new novel, Brothers. His gentle ways, his soulful flute playing, his description of the deprivation he’s suffered helped to pull me back from the cliff’s edge. He reminded me of a reality unseen: a whole, wonderful community out there of moderate, compassionate, three-dimensional people who strive to become whole, to integrate mind, soul, and emotions in what they do – who are brave enough to know and testify out loud to – dare we say it? - the power of love. My new meditation is to honor this virtual community of lemurs which has become tangible to me – just like we honor ‘all of our saints’. They – you - give me courage. If the new science is right, it’s not beyond reason (all right, it is beyond reason but it may be true any way) that we can support each other through adding our positive energies to the holofield, even when not physically present to one another. Our “old” faith would call it prayer and faith and miracles.

But the lemmings amongst us run with a different crowd. They came to the edge of the cliff in Congress and almost followed their leader over the edge of sanctioning alternative methods of interrogation for suspected “terrorists” - torture. Richard Cohen, in fluent lemurese, reminded:
“We do not torture. We do not have kangaroo courts. We are John McCain, not his North Vietnamese jailers.” Washington Post columnist, Cincinnati Enquirer 9-20-06

And John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham, Colin Powell et al acted: ‘Wait a minute’, they said, ‘we’re lemurs!’ and came up with compromise legislation that honors the Geneva Conventions.

With just a change of verb tense Charles Dickens’ description of 1700 France stands for Life In 2006:
“ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”Tale of Two Cities.

What’s getting worse is evident immediately – just turn on the TV; finding what’s getting better takes a little longer. But, how about this:
“… moments of stress or real difficulty are ‘points of power’ in developing vision and interacting in our lives – if we develop the discipline to first notice how we’re truly feeling and be honest in acknowledging ‘what is’, objectively, emotionally, and physically.” Robert Fritz, student of creativity, Presence, Peter Senge, et al.

It’s the “if” in that passage that arrests me. Discovering how I truly feel? Seeing what is actually happening? That takes a bit of doing – and sometimes some sleepless nights; but once done, I cannot continue blithely down my same habitual road whether I’m ignoring physical symptoms, weight gain, or the effects of a stressful job that pays the bills. It’s the lack of acknowledgment of feelings, the defense of ignoring ‘what is’ that keeps me mired in bogs that don’t support Life in my life.
Rev. Steven Charleston, Dean of Episcopal Divinity School, has chosen not to be mired. He invites us to a path away from the cliff’s edge: to witness intentionally – particularly at this time in the Episcopal/Anglican version of the world’s splintering – but it applies broadly, at least to me
“I believe in the community of God…I open my hands; I open my heart. I want the world to see that I am not afraid. I step gratefully into the unconditional love of God. I stand up to be counted; not for what I think is right; but for what I believe to be possible.” Episcopal Divinity School, May 2006.

Wait a minute! That’s the way that is!

It’ s time for Turn Lane Live. A gathering at Panera Bread, Hyde Park Plaza, Cincinnati, OH, Monday, October 16, 2006, 7:00 pm.
All lemurs and lemmings welcome!

P.S. Hopeful note: While standing on a corner last night with about 25 others holding Peace signs, I was amazed at the numbers of people who honked, gave peace and thumbs up signs as they drove by! And this in the reddest part of a Red State. Very, very different from September, 2004.

© Beverly Jones
Do Good. Together
Happy Fall!

I Do. I Will. I Promise.

2006-09-20T08:56:00.000-04:00

Political messages on my answering machine – more and more requests for contributions to campaigns and pleas for volunteers means the mid-term elections for Congress are getting closer. Maybe the 49% of us who want to see change will move us off The Message of fear, division and chutzpah that’s pounded us for six years. The most novel request I’ve received was from the national women’s peace group Code Pink (www.codepink.com). They didn’t ask for money, they asked for my pledge of a personal commitment – that I would vote only for candidates who have committed to foster peace – a plan for Iraq and no pre-emptive war. I’m no different from the rest of us – I do not take pledges and vows lightly. I pledge allegiance to the United States of America with a hand over my heart. When I promise to do something, it comes from a deeper place than just saying yes. Vows are serious business: Institutionally we arrange for some teaching and reflection before we commit to wedding and baptismal vows. Who’s elected is serious business too. Code Pink wants me to take this seriously and I did. I signed.
Gandhi was one who knew the power of pledges and vows. This week, September 11 in fact, was also the 100th anniversary of Gandhi’s original non-violent peace pledge in South Africa. He asked:
“some 3,000 oppressed Indians to profess a vow of nonviolence to resist racist laws: "The government has taken leave of all sense of decency," Gandhi said.
“Gandhi’s 100th Anniversary” ,(John Dear, Common Dreams, 9-14-06)

I know the end of this story. I read that many around the country celebrated this anniversary by renewing their own vows of non-violence. Some stepped up to learn ways of living non-violently, including civil disobedience – even some of us here in the red heartland of “Marines Don’t Cut and Run”. Sept. 21 – 28 is National Peace Week. During the week actions organized by people who have taken their own silent vows not to be silent may include sit-ins in congressional offices of non-peace members as well as local prayer vigils, candidate-citizen forums, leafleting. At this time on my non-violent journey I pray better than I sit-in.

In the spirit of stemming violence, Desmond Tutu brought voice this week to an issue that’s long bothered me: where do all these fighting people get their weapons? This must be big business – but, whose? He says:
"I've also learnt a lot about the business of war: the arms trade. In my opinion it is the modern slave trade.
In 2005, Russia, the United States, France, Germany and the UK accounted for an estimated 82 per cent of the global arms market.
In October, governments will vote on a resolution at the UN General Assembly to start working towards an Arms Trade Treaty….a ban on selling weapons if there is a clear risk they will be used to abuse human rights or fuel conflict."
(“The Modern Successor to the Slave Trade: No longer should the peace business be undermined by the arms business” by Desmond Tutu, 9-13-06 by the Independent / UK. Accessed on Common Dreams)
I don’t care to wager what vote Mr. Bolton will cast.

I’m stunned by the power of non-violence: the millions and millions of pledges and vows that supported movements and leaders eliminated apartheid in South Africa (Tutu); brought down colonial rule in India (Gandhi); and In our own country brought the vote to women and created a civil rights revolution (Martin Luther King, Jr) In all cases it wasn’t until the moderates joined that the non-violent movements fulfilled their promise. Gives this moderate pause.
Our political-cultural traffic flow shows tiny merges of new energy entering the national awareness. Jurriaan Kemp, editor of Ode Magazine says:
Our era demands people who do not draw boundaries, but transcend them. Where are they?...What about us?: What are we doing to spread hope? Are we saying loudly enough that we do not believe in fear, that we feel betrayed by fundamentalism? ”Toward A post-fear world”, Ode Magazine, October, 2006.

Peter Senge et al describe in Presence how group creativity actually works; how people can intentionally meld their spirits, transcend the boundaries Kemp mentions and together create plans and actions that spring from the heart - that address what we really care about, what we need in order to thrive and support genuine life for us all and for our planet. These and other new scientists show us new-old links to spirit found in ancient philosophies and religions, including ours:. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24 We need charismatic leaders only if we think we do. This is the message I’m hearing for our times.

Something's coming,

I don't know what it is,

Secure Insecurity

2006-08-12T13:36:00.000-04:00

August 10, 2006

…..So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
John 10:16

What an icon! One white “Euro-American” father, one “Asian-American” mother, five children, 14 pieces of luggage plus assorted boxes waiting at Heathrow Airport to fly home to Uganda. The family was interviewed by CNN on Thursday. If ever there was a sign of how our world is changing – this was it. Mixed races, mixed “homelands” mixed up in the swirl of people from distant points trying to flow to other distant points. And they were all connected to 24 young men who dreamed of terror. No, it certainly isn’t Kansas, Toto.

In another bit of Oz brought into my living room via CSpan, a young Beruit blogger, sitting on the roof of his house, described the Israeli rockets zinging overhead. A friend of his – in Israel – contributed to the blog from that viewpoint – watching Hezbollah rockets fly toward Israel and his community.

Maybe it’s because I’ve so recently picked up the shattered pieces of my technological life that I’m sensitized to the rapid changes rolling toward us. It feels as if the pace of change cannot go much faster but, it probably can - and will. Ervin Laszlo, philosopher of science and pioneer in systems theory says:
Many signs point to the fact that we are entering a new period of ecological and social instability, a time rife with chaos but also a window of exceptional freedom to decide our destiny. Ode Magazine, September, 2006

That’s bad news, good news. Bad news first. In the language of Four Rooms of Change – denial time is over, confusion reigns. Pema Chödrön, Buddhist nun, explained to Bill Moyers (Faith And Reason, PBS 8-4-06)

I see that a lot of us are just running around in circles pretending that there's ground where there actually isn't any ground. And that somehow, if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open and free and loving and compassionate in any situation.

We Christians have heard that before. “On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.” In the vernacular of a friend, all other ground becomes “Whatever!”

It’s good news that this groundlessness pushes us to be creative. My version is: What would I do if my local area were in chaos? As far as I know my community does not have any emergency plan….if X happens, go to Y. And we say we have a department of Homeland Security? Kindness is another good news by-product of the experience of communal groundlessness – which all this terrorist talk engenders. We find our better natures; we connect – Katrina, 9/11, Pakistani earthquake. Chodron again:
Because, basically, the kindness comes out of not being able to escape from groundlessness. And then, when everyone is in the same situation, you're all groundless together, the only thing that makes sense is kindness.

So here we all are: the mixed race/ mixed nation family; the citizen Lebanese-Israeli “enemy-friends”; the terrified terrorists; and our anxious selves, all afloat in the energy field we call the universe. We may whisper ‘stop the world, I want to get off’, knowing that’s not an option. We are here now – all races, all nations, terrorists as well as peacemakers– connected by our humanity; one flock. We have no choice but to go forward enmeshed in this web we call life. We have only the choice of how.
Listen:
BILL MOYERS: There's a line somewhere. Someone says, I'm only paraphrasing it, that when an old culture is dying-
PEMA: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: --the new culture will be formed by men and women who are not afraid of insecurity.

And who are they? Laszlo’s idea is that - in the systems view of the universe - our minds link with other minds and energy all around us. This openness to others, to nature, to spirit was known to mystics and prophets like Jesus and is emerging in our times.

One flock. One shepherd.

It’s no wonder that Rev. James Forbes, Riverside Chuch, NYC, thinks it should be the churches – the people in them – who step forward to Be the peace, the conscience, the connectors, we long for.
My antidote to groundlessness is to walk on this web of connectedness, which, like a swinging rope bridge across the chasm, offers secure insecurity.

It is enough to know I’m part of the flock; that shepherds watch.
All else is “Whatever!”

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.

…For the Waters Have Risen Up To My Neck…

2006-08-09T12:36:00.000-04:00

Reflections On Life In the Turn Lane
August 7, 2006

Where was I before lightning’s death blow to my computer’s hard drive so rudely interrupted my technological life? My prayer these past two weeks has been “please God, …do not let the Pit shut its mouth upon me.” (Psalm 69:17) Actually, Psalm 69 seems most appropriate for these times - both personal and political. I have often thought that I might have been the 69th psalmist in a previous life - so apt have been its images for some moments in my life. What with mourning my loss of addresses, resurrecting my computer connections, and hiding my eyes from CNN’s commercially driven, horrific images of death , this surely seems appropriate: “Save Me, O God, for the waters have risen up to my neck.“(Psalm 69:1) Shall I suggest it to Condi and Donald?

Crises have a way of putting one in crisis; perspective is the casualty. In that morass all that’s apparent is the detail - like standing too close to an oil painting. Should I do this or this? What about that? Where can I find it? How do I do it? Who knows? How much will it cost? And then there’s: How Much Will It Cost? That’s the level of detail I hear in the news broadcasts - like me, we seem to have lost the big picture. I need it back.

Our best selves come from our big pictures - images we’ve acquired from our faith, the good Samaritan, feeding the 5000, Jesus‘ forgiveness; actions stimulated by thoughtful leaders (yes, Virginia - there have been such): the Marshall Plan, UN Declaration of Human rights, space exploration, attempts to make dents in poverty. We are more than the sum of our details. So I’m past ready; I‘m panting for relief from the ideological and tactical desert of the past weeks…no not weeks -- years. I fear we’re so far gone that something like “The Quest” from Man of LaMancha seems hopelessly sentimental and out of date to our cynically tuned ears. It surely is outside the digital mental set of our culture - we don’t deal much in poetry and analogs these days.

But just for a moment of refreshment what might we find there if we did?
To dream the impossible dream - where all human life is sacredTo fight the unbeatable foe - apathy, fear, suffering To bear with unbearable sorrow - the consequences of our neglectTo run where the brave dare not go; - to alternatives, to spirit, to each otherTo right the unrightable wrong - denial of the common needs of our human spirit. To love, pure and chaste, from afar,- all that we know that we need To try, when your arms are too weary, To reach the unreachable star! This is my Quest - to follow that star, No matter how hopeless, no matter how far; And the world will be better for this: That [people], scorned and covered with scars, Still strove, with [their] last ounce of courage, To reach the unreachable stars! “The Quest” from Man of LaMancha.
Ah, I used to know how to dream. Dreams and visions and plans come first, actions are their consequence. CNN shows the dark side of that dream-action sequence; summarized by Jerry Landay ::

When dreams fall apart, humans often respond with rage, hysteria, hopelessness, and fear. How many more will find false comfort in the preachments of dangerous demagogues, who offer certitude by finding scapegoats? How many will seek solace in radical religious frenzy, pronouncing wrathful judgment on America while rooting out "the godless"?
“What Happens When the Dream Dies?”, Jerry Landay, Providence Journal August 3, 2006

As cathartic as Psalm 69 is - I can’t live there. Neither can the psalmist. We both reach for the unreachable star -

As for me, I am afflicted and in pain;
Your help, O God, will lift me up on high.
I will praise the Name of God in song;
I will proclaim his greatness with thanksgiving. (69:31-32)
Let the heavens and the earth praise him,
The seas and all that moves in them; (69:36)

So, let the dreams begin
And, like peace, may they begin with me.

Beverly Jones © 2006
Do Good. Together.
It’s great to be back.

Kicking The Habit

2006-07-01T19:34:00.000-04:00

Habituated deference. Isn’t that a wonderfully expressive phrase? It is how Neil Elliott, Episcopal priest, describes “an old and familiar Episcopal habit” that seemed to have overtaken the deputies at the recent General Convention. By deferring to the pleas (and positions?) of Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and Bishop-elect Katherine Jefferts Schori clergy and lay passed resolution B033 which they had repudiated the day before by rejecting resolution (A121). "Peace! Be Still!": Marching Orders from General Convention” Neil Elliott, June 23, 2006 The Witness
I’m not sure Episcopalians own that habit of caving to authority. History tells us it’s been around for a while and our post-modern times can’t seem to shake it. The Bush Administration’s alternative: defer to no one, doesn’t seem much of an advance for humankind. In these upside down times the question to defer or not to defer is a critical one. Maybe the Episcopal-Anglican drama points to a need for a period of active discernment that will take us beyond “either/or” and nearer to “both/and”. Maybe with a post-modern lens we will see new ways to move ourselves forward – and take a giant leap away from hierarchy and patriarchy. Oh, all right, I’m willing to settle for a small step. But, maybe, at least we could trade the habit of deference (to yield an opinion) for respect (show consideration).
As institutions continue to crumble, we’d better find some alternatives to hierarchy and patriarchy if we want some control and choice in building new structures to house our diversity. Good luck. We have few, if any models. Many, if not most of us, were raised with the image of God as “out there” – the ultimate patriarch – judging and deciding events “down here”. All of us as children were conditioned by the adults in our lives – parents and teachers - telling, telling, telling. We’ve all been habituated. If Darwin is right, maybe by now it is in our genes. I know I can suddenly become too busy to deal with the conflict I sense is coming – even deliberately walk away. I also know I’m not alone.
Aren’t we supposed to “give up childish things”? Doesn’t growing up mean we learn to stand up for ourselves – to grow beyond habits that have shaped and limited us. We’re also to learn respect for others who are growing – at whatever pace they can manage. We’ve begun: Post-modern theology tells us that God is “immanent and transcendent” - here as well as beyond – panentheism Marcus Borg calls it. It’s an important push toward shaking our “us/them – up there/down here” habit.
The Episcopalian-Anglican angst also offers up this: “Nobody is willing to listen to the majority in the middle.” The majority in the middle! That’s right – in politics, in the media as well as in church – the majority is in the middle. Is it silent because it’s busy deferring and mute or because no one is listening?

Bits of Borg and Cloud and Townsend are antibiotics to my infection of habituated deference. What can Christianity mean if it is not to see Jesus and his ministry as models for how to be human? Borg’s thesis is that Jesus replaced holiness (adherence to laws and separation) with compassion – that his “table fellowship” (all are welcome) was,
“a political act of national significance….a protest against the present structures of Israel….an alternative program was advocated for the people of God….” Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus.

Seems like we still need a protest against present structures. And we think we’re making progress as human beings?
How about this, from Henry Cloud and John Townsend?
“You can be patient with some things while they are being resolved without giving the other person freedom to hurt you.” Boundaries Face To Face

When in the throes of habituated deference, I tend to give away the freedom – maybe they’re right (I think), they’re so much more forceful, why don’t they understand my pain and on and on. Counter-intuitively, Cloud and Townsend say confrontation can preserve love:
Love needs protection. It is like tending a garden. If you want your plants to survive and thrive, you need to do more than water and feed them. You also need to protect them from bad weather, insects and disease.”

And: “Be proactive about getting your needs and wishes met inside the relationship….don’t do it in a way that is destructive to the relationship. Keep yourself free from bitterness and the other person free from control.”

As I try to kick the habit of deference their words become my mantra:

“There are three things on the table:
you, the other person, and the issue.”

© Beverly Jones 2006
Do Good. Together.

The Pause That Doesn't Refresh

2006-06-26T09:22:00.000-04:00

June 25, 2006

Maybe there is something to this astrological idea that events in the cosmos influence events here on earth. We passed through the summer solstice this week – that point of balance where lengthening stops and shortening begins. Like the pause between exhaling and inhaling, the events I’ve paid attention to this week have that quality of suspension before the next round. Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in but the political talk show rhetoric (and news) seems so devoid of anything beyond the top ten reasons why Bush is Bad and the need for Democrats to get a Message that I now pause to refresh - and turn them off. Could it be that we’ve run out of focus and new things to say? Whether it’s desensitization or saturation, I seem no longer able to distinguish dead bodies from Iraq, Israel, or Darfur. That’s not the me I’ve known.

And then there’s the Episcopal Church’s recent General Convention. It seems the church, too, has paused (actually on the day of Solstice!) – urged by Presiding Bishop Griswold – they decided not to develop a meaningful response to the thrust by the traditionalists to exclude the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion. Instead the Convention urged the church to “exercise restraint…” *(Resolution B033) and therefore, to delay again full inclusion of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. What is it the peace community says? Justice delayed is justice denied? (William Gladstone during the slavery debates). Yet, in the Convention’s pause they elected a woman as the next Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church – surely as much of an affront to the traditionalists within the Communion as inclusion of homosexuals in leadership positions. Many say this election has to be the work of the Holy Spirit. Now what - the Spirit seems to challenge.

So the next round is still before us. How long will it take the Episcopal Church to “proclaim a Gospel as we understand it” – and with which the current and future Presiding Bishops have publicly agreed? How long before the Church “defends the approach to theology that most theologians in our church actually use?” “Saving Anglicanism” Lionel Deimel. I guess resolution B033* is the best we can do when faced with an adamant, organized and well-funded minority, leadership that wants “unity over integrity” (Dean James Diamond) and a process that did not support actual reconciliation – which begins with allowing all positions to have a voice.
Is that not the lesson here? That we humans cannot seem to find a way to deal with adamancy in our relationships and leadership that leads where we really do not want to go? We seem to cave every time; we just can’t seem to say no, yet each time crying, Never Again! Jesus did not bow to the social ethos of his time, he tells us to include everyone and, yes, he was crucified. Is that it? Is that what we’re afraid of?

So what do we do in families when one person demands others bend to their will? Many of us cave in; wives become battered, children become despots. Henry Cloud and John Townsend (Christian psychologists) always, always ask what the “bendee” has done to contribute to the situation (log in your eye) – by being passive? by talking and not acting? by praying only and not doing? How can the ‘other side’ learn if they are not engaged in the conversation? Engagement requires empathy for their hurt or wish, communication of desire to strengthen the relationship and clear statements about the effect of their demands on you and what you require of them or what you will or won’t do (boundaries) to strengthen and continue in the relationship. Their work teaches a process, how to engage, how to set boundaries, how to improve relationships. (How People Grow, Boundaries, Face To Face, How To Have The Conversation You’ve Been Avoiding)

In this time of pause – my prayer is that Process might surface – the awareness that we don’t know and need to learn “how to”, that we acquire the skills and develop the organizational structures that support engagement, reconciliation and strengthening relationships. There are lots of process gurus out there now: Marshall Rosenberg’s work in non-violent communication, George Lakey’s work in non-violence: Training for Change; Peter Senge’s systemic cultural change in his book Presence.
When it comes into my life, it isn’t the changed circumstances that I fear, it’s the prospect of the loss of personal control and power. These gurus and their processes teach how to maintain control and power during change; that leads to growth, acceptance and the opportunity to move on. Otherwise one is stuck, marking time. Haven’t we learned yet that God’s creation doesn’t work that way?

We can participate in God’s creation or we can hide, resist or deny.
I may not like it, but I and we cannot stop it.
© Beverly Jones
Do Good. Together.

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* Resolution B033: “B033 calls on bishops and standing committees to "exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion." It makes no mention of same-gender blessings. (Passed at a Joint Session called by Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold after the previous day’s rejection of A161.)
House of Deputies the day before had voted down resolution A161, preventing it from going to the House of Bishops and rejecting the resolution's call for "very considerable caution in the nomination, election, consent to, and consecration of bishops whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion." The resolution also would have directed the church not to develop rites for blessing same-gender unions. Matthew Davies, Episcopal News Service, Saturday, June 24, 2006

Three C's

2006-06-18T20:57:00.000-04:00

This is not a good time to be alive if one has trouble making choices. Amid selections on phone menus, a bazillion tunes waiting to be downloaded, overflowing bins of vegetables, organic or conventional, in the grocery and the chance of a lower gas price in the next block – daily life can strain one’s choosing apparatus.
So I chose a vacation where choices are manageable – same swim suit, same cool surf, same walk on the warm beach, same full moon glistening on the ocean – ahh!!
Not only did I use vacation to catch my breath, but to ask the waves where I am and what’s next. My beach-reading mysteries didn’t last long enough so I dipped into the deeper stuff – and found the surf speaking of new places and possibilities – if one can stand to do the choosing involved. David Korten speaks of the shift from Empire to Cooperation/Community, Alan Toffler sees greater individual independence (and opportunity and choice) as the traditional institutions continue to breakdown. And the cautionary tale is told by Fawaz A. Gerges Journey of the Jihadist. Aside from what I’m learning about jihadists and muslamists and their enemies near and far (that’s us) – Gerges’ story of what happened to his village in Lebanon in the 1970’s should be required reading – of what can happen to a religiously diverse, stable community when extreme religious and nationalistic elements replace regard for law and human dignity – seeds of which have been planted in our very soil.

“And on October 7, 1975 death came to Tal Abbas, my village. It was 3:00 a.m. – pitch dark. Some of the attackers came in pickup trucks, so that they could carry off everything possible – refrigerators, televisions sets, furniture. Those who arrived on foot planned to steal cars. For several long hours the villagers were at their mercy.” Journey of the Jihadist

I guess what our religious and political friends of the right are telling us is that the prospect of continued economic, scientific and social shifting and the choices we all must make under those conditions is more than they want to (or can) deal with. It would be much easier to pass laws against, as if that will really stem the tide of change, than to find new ways of being together. I certainly agree with them that the prospect of terrorism is – as intended – terrifying and that we should be dealing with threats to our tenuous stability.
It’s the tenuousness that I have become more aware of on this vacation – that as institutions we’re held together by the invisible bonds of respect for law and the ideals of our constitution – and still have some underlying sense of human dignity. The current General Convention of the Episcopal Church – this very week - is living both the tenuousness of stability and the struggle to establish new boundaries and ways to be together. The recent deaths of close friends has increased my awareness of our human vulnerability and limits – underscoring the most basic of principles for individuals as well as countries and churches – that choices have consequences.

So my conversation with the waves and brown pelicans has told me I had better be about making choices that count for good – for myself more carrots and walks and fewer cookies and Law and Order reruns - and for my community – to look in new places to help people come together more collaboratively, to help all voices have an opportunity to speak at whatever table I find myself, to start conversations about what matters: law, respect for all and boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

Through the courtesy of a Turn Lane Reader, I close with comments by Lionel Deimel, PhD., member of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh. Even though he is talking about the split in the Episcopal Church, he says so well and, in my mind, articulates principles that apply to all aspects of our social-economic-political revolution: Listen. You can find more at http://deimel.org .
“We should consider making a more principled, straightforward, and courageous response. {to the “traditional rebels”] We should consider the novel ideal of proclaiming the Gospel as we understand it… We could remind others of Bishop Desmond Tutu’s explanation for how we have always maintained communion –“we meet”… Before we cede authority to others, we could insist that those to whom we have ceded no authority refrain from intimidation. …We could, in other words, insist that we have as much right to make claims on the Communion as it does on the Episcopal Church.”

My hope is that more and more of us will catch this spirit of the new age coming – from the bottom up; once caught that we then can speak it to our friends on the right, and all of our hierarchical institutional leaders.

Choices Commitment
……and Courage

© Beverly Jones
Do Good. Together.

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And Then There's...

2006-06-03T16:49:00.000-04:00

June 1, 2006

Have you heard? It’s in the stars!… I can’t find the lyrics to this old tune, but I have certainly found its spirit. Last night on Lehrer’s NewsHour Hamilton Jordan, Democrat, Carter’s campaign manager and Doug Bailey, Ford’s media person, announced a truly innovative political initiative: Unity08 – the development of an online movement, not party driven, to develop values and issues from the bottom-up, from those of us who haven’t found a home in either the Republican or Democratic parties of our times.. They hope to hold an on-line “convention” and end up with candidates, of any party, who offer leadership to actually begin solving the overwhelming problems of the day; who think beyond homosexual marriage and abortion as #1 issues. Unity08 thinks there are enough concerned Americans, other than those on the red or blue fringes, who share values and deep concerns about the direction of the country and its elitist campaign process to make this happen. Netroots! Here we come! So click on over to http://unity08.com/ and prepare to be stunned by the comprehensiveness of the site and their concepts. And it’s fun to get a taste of (and maybe participate in) this huge conversation out there in ethersville. (There’s also an article on Unity08 in this week’s Newsweek.)
Oh, I know it may not work exactly as planned – they haven’t addressed how to include the minority of us who do not have access to the web - but what a relief to see us begin to find our way out of the quagmire. It is a spark that will light we know not what. It’s hard to keep up with God’s new things.

And then there’s Condoleezza Rice & Co. proposing something sensible for Iran to consider. Actual boundaries, as I understand it: real freedom for Iran to choose between social-economic isolation or their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Of course, talking to Iran first – before conditions have been laid down – might have had an even better chance. And then there’s the actual collaboration this represents – a concept that doesn’t ordinarily flow from the wings of the White House. Europe and America joining together – with believe it or not – Russia and China to present a united front. And how about the two women leading that group – Condi and the British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett – and one of them black! Can it get any better? Yes, having it actually work; having the powers see that everyone is safer together than apart.

Life’s circumstances have seen to it that I haven’t kept up with the details of what’s happening….but between snatches of BBC in the wakeful night and NPR on the boring highway I think I’ve heard there’s another marriage amendment to the constitution afloat in Congress again, and an English-only designation for the good ol’ USA. And, the most interesting item - that Anglo parents are rushing to sign up their pre-schoolers in total immersion Spanish classes.
I heard 3 year olds, on Morning Edition, spontaneously using Spanglish in their daily lives – sticking Spanish words and phrases in amidst their standard English. Now there’s a view of the future. Just as America has ultimately absorbed other cultures and become an amalgam, our language will not be the language of our great grandkids. We haven’t legislated an American-only cuisine – and how could we do without pizza, crepes, sushi (well that one I could do without). So it looks like we’ll end up with an enriched language as well as diet, not either-or but both-and. Legislation cannot control that inevitability. Things naturally seem to flow together – not apart.

And then, of course, there’s the war and earthquakes, immigrants and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. One theory is that the ultra-conservatives and religious-right take their “anti” and aggressive positions out of fear – fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of loss of their known cultural ways and pre-determined identity. This week’s activity has probably pushed their fear temperature up a few degrees. So I expect we’ll see more strident rhetoric, more restrictive legislative proposals and an increase in mega-church membership.

This level of change takes effort and energy to absorb. So, I’m taking a step backwards in order to move forward – tapping the collective spirit and experience of the ancients – who were not exempt from change and fear – whose poetic language moves me to a level of abstraction where I can breathe again:

Keeping in mind that God is love – the Psalmist reminds those who live in the shelter of the Most High –
…You will not fear the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day… Psalm 91

Sing along:
And he will raise you up on eagle's wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His hand. Eagles Wings, Michael Joncas, 1979
Amen

© Beverly Jones Do Good. Together.
Next week the Lane Turns toward the beach. I’ll think about you as the surf and I and the spirit that sustains both solve all problems and will again park in the Turn Lane on June 17.