Conjectures

2011-06-01T22:02:00.004-04:00

Fire in the Belly

I just returned from a conference:

One man spoke powerfully out of his fire. He sought to tell the burning coal of truth. It flamed up and then out dangerously onto the floor. Many were singed. They closed their ears. They slumped into their seats. They shut down.

Another man spoke out of his fire. It was contained in the fireplace. Then from the backlog, a flame fired up powerfully for a few seconds. We listened! We woke up!

Why do institutions--including the church--too often quench the fire in us? How can we learn to speak more like the second man, dangerously, but not destructively?

2010-02-27T10:20:00.001-05:00

THE SCAPEGOAT
Question of the Day: Am I more concerned about changing others or myself?

Jesus “took away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) by exposing it first of all as different than we imagined, and letting us know that our pattern of ignorant killing, attacking and blaming others, is in fact history’s primary illusion and its primary lie. He both revealed and resolved the issue on the cross, so it must have been an absolutely central issue for human history and salvation.

Then Jesus invited us into a Great Participative Love, which would make it possible for us also not to hate. The game was over after Jesus, at least for those who “gazed” long enough on “the one that they had pierced” (John 19:37). For those who did not gaze, the game continued under even better disguises.

Through Jesus, we all have to face the embarrassing truth that we ourselves are our primary problem. It is we who must die, he teaches, not others! Our greatest temptation is to try to change other people instead of ourselves. Jesus allowed himself to be transformed and thus transformed others. That is the meaning of the necessary death of Jesus.
Richard Rohr

2010-01-05T20:41:00.001-05:00

GOD is hidden within the soul, and the true contemplative will seek Him there in love saying, “Where have you hidden yourself.” St. John of the Cross

IMPORTANT distinction from Stringfellow: “I understand grief to be the total experience of loss, anger, outrage, fear, regret, melancholy, abandonment, temptation, bereftness, helplessness suffered privately, within one's self, in response to the happening of death. By distinction and contrast, I comprehend mourning as the liturgies of recollection, memorial, affection, honor, gratitude, confession, empathy, intercession, meditation, anticipation for the life of the one who is dead. Empirically, in the reality of someone's death, and in the aftermath of it, grief and mourning are, of course, jumbled. It is, I think, part of the healing of mourning to sort out and identify the one from the other. In any case, of all those I have known and loved and grieved and mourned, Anthony's life was the closest to my own, and the most complementary, so his death is my most intimate experience in grief and mourning. From that experience—so far—what I have to say is: grieving is about weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; mourning is about rejoicing—rejoicing in the Lord. From that standpoint, I confess I have found mourning Anthony an exquisite, bittersweet experience...
William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience of Mourning

2009-12-31T21:45:00.003-05:00

For the New Year

In any case, by sanctification I mean the endeavor by which a person is sanctified or rendered holy. The endeavor is not one of the person so affected but, quite the contrary, is an effort of the Word of God, which elects the one made holy and which, I believe, offers similar election freely to every person.

To be more precise about it, sanctification is a reiteration of the act of creation in the Word of God. Thus sanctification refers to the activity of the historic Word God renewing human life (and all of created life) in the midst of the era of the fall, or during the present darkness, in which the power of death apparently reigns.

Holiness designates the essential condition of a person who confesses that he or she has suffered the renewal of his or her being, or selfhood, in the Word of God and is restored to wholeness as a human being. While there is an implication, in being holy, of incessant repentance there is no implication of perfection or of any superior moral status. Among humans, holiness may involve a relatively more profound experience of being human, but it does not indicate as such the exceptional or the extraordinary. To the contrary, holy connotes holistic in human life and, in that connection, the normal, the ordinary, the generic, the exemplary.

I am aware, of course, that sanctification is ridiculed and holiness is belittled—and the saints are defamed and scandalized—when especial moral worth or purity or achievement is imputed to being holy. This is in reality a condescension of those conformed to the world, their form of dismissal, an excuse for others to cop out in a manner which pretends to recognize and flatter the saints.

William Stringfellow, The Politics of Spirituality

2009-10-05T08:14:00.000-04:00

OKAY, IT'S NOT JUST RACISM

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Paul Krugman NYT

2009-07-08T21:50:00.001-04:00

WHO MAKES THESE DECISIONS? OR MENDACITY OF THE CORPORATE MEDIA

One of the mysteries of the way issues are covered in much of the news media is how certain views get ruled “out of the mainstream” and just don’t get covered — even when many well-informed people hold those views.

The most notorious example was during the buildup to the Iraq war: skepticism about the case for war was treated as a fringe view, even though the evidence being presented by the hawks was flimsy on its face, and the ranks of the skeptics included a number of people with excellent national-security credentials.

But in a way, the implicit censorship on the stimulus debate is even stranger. During the initial discussion of the stimulus, the debate was framed almost entirely as a debate between Obama and those who said the stimulus was too big; the voices of those saying it was too small were largely frozen out. And they still are — if it weren’t for my position on the Times op-ed page, there would be hardly any major outlet for Keynesian concerns.

And here’s the thing: in this case, there isn’t any hidden evidence — you can’t argue that the CIA knows something the rest of us don’t. And the voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.

But somehow, the pro-stimulus people are unpersons. Who makes these decisions?

Paul Krugman

2009-07-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

CALVIN ON LOVE
"It is the common habit of mankind that the more closely men are bound together by the ties of kinship, of acquaintanceship, or of neighborhood, the more responsibilities for one another they share. This does not offend God; for his providence, as it were, leads us to it. But I say: we ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God,"
John Calvin, whose 500th birthday is this Friday.

2009-06-25T21:41:00.000-04:00

Two Things to Say About Him

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life.
Andrew Sullivan

2009-05-28T11:30:00.002-04:00

NOW THAT THEY'RE OUT OF POWER, THEY'VE GONE MAD

The attacks on Sonia Sotomayor are getting crazier by the minute. The pronunciation of her name is unnatural. Her fondness for Puerto Rican cuisine — sorry, her “claimed” fondness (you never know) — may cloud her impartiality. She doesn’t have enough money in her retirement account.

But is this any crazier, when you come down to it, than the Cult of Bush that ruled much of Washington for years? It was positive, not negative (though there was plenty of that too), but it was similarly about identity politics — you were supposed to support Bush, not because of how he did his job, but because he was, drumroll, a regular guy. Remember Peggy Noonan

'I was asked this week why the president seems so attractive to the heartland, to what used to be called Middle America. A big question. I found my mind going to this word: normal. Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He’s not exotic...'

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.

Paul Krugman

2009-05-21T22:24:00.002-04:00

CYNICAL UNREPENTANCE

A simple note having now read the former vice-president's despicable and disgraceful speech. It confirms the very worst of him, and reveals just how callow, just how arrogant, and just how reckless and unrepentant this man is and has long been. There was not a whisper of regret or reflection; there was a series of lies and distortions, a reckless attack on a graceful successor, inheriting a world of intractable problems, and a reminder that while serious men and women will indeed move on, Cheney never will. He remains a threat to this country's constitution as he remains a stain on its honor and moral standing. I never believed I would hear a vice-president of the United States not simply defend torture but insist on pride in it, insist on its honor. But that is what he said, with that sly grin insisting that fear always beats reason, that violence always beats dialogue, and that torture is always an American value.

He repeats this core untruth:
"In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations."

This "strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations" is the sober conclusion of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report, as well as every report issued getting to the bottom of Abu Ghraib.

Andrew Sullivan

2009-05-10T08:13:00.001-04:00

Halcyon Era For Local Corruption?

Newspapers do a praiseworthy job of trying to keep the dark side at bay, by shining sun on it. But society may not consider us obligatory, as we’re finding out...

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”
Maureen Dowd

2009-05-01T16:22:00.001-04:00

Which region is the true Socialist state?

-Europe has cradle to grave health care plans, generous unemployment benefits, and free or subsidized college costs.

-The US gives away public assets (oil, gas, mineral rights) for pennies on the dollar, has huge subsidies and tax breaks, and bails out reckless speculators.

It turns out that both regions are welfare states — only in Europe, the natural population (i.e., people) is the recipient, while in the US, the corporate population is the beneficiary.

The Big Picture

2009-04-22T11:39:00.001-04:00

THERE'S A WORD FOR THIS

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Paul Krugman

2009-04-17T16:06:00.000-04:00

The Banality Of Evil
"I don't see it as a dark chapter in our history at all," - Charles Krauthammer, yesterday.

"The pictures are shocking and the practices appalling," - Charles Krauthammer, on Abu Ghraib, May 14, 2004.

As we now know, Bush and Cheney authorized torture techniques much worse than what we saw at Abu Ghraib, and as we now know, the techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib were garbled copies of practices already endorsed and authorized by the Bush White House. So what can possibly account for Krauthammer's shock at Abu Ghraib and pride in the torture program? That one was poorly organized and leaked? Or that Krauthammer's friends are now to be held responsible rather than reservists thrown into the deep end of the Rumsfeld gulag?
Andrew Sullivan

2009-04-03T10:54:00.000-04:00

ON LEADERSHIP

There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow [person] to make the first move – and he [or she], in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the open hearted and courageous way, many others will follow.
Marion Anderson, Contralto, performed at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939

2009-03-29T18:10:00.001-04:00

On "Natural Philosophy" and Religion

From Ingrid Rowland's article in the NYRB:

The invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century revealed a miniature world no less vast and complicated than the depths of the starry heavens, themselves gloriously unveiled not long before by the telescope. Creatures previously invisible to human eyes proved to be crafted in detail as marvelous as that of any visible plant or beast, a fact that threw religion and science (in those days still known as natural philosophy) into an existential confusion, from which neither discipline has yet emerged entirely. It was one thing to discover new continents or new constellations, and quite another to discover, as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek—the Dutch inventor of the microscope—did with some horror, that whole kingdoms of "animalcules" were carrying on their lives within his own mouth.
From Andrew Sullivan

2009-03-29T17:30:00.005-04:00

RECOVERING FROM THE DEIFICATION OF MARKETS

An article in The Atlantic on the Cult of Finance is now popular, The Quiet Coup, which is similar to the book, Bailout Nation. From the confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed in the past decade a river of deregulatory policies that was the idolatrous deification of markets:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light or invisible hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and estactic celebration: finance unleashed and fed, it was thought, would propel the economy to ever greater heights...
The Big Picture

2009-03-17T22:25:00.005-04:00

WE WERE AT WORK IN A TRENCH. The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces.... I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet'!---and the light shineth in the darkness.
Viktor Frankl

I DON'T KNOW WHO--or what--put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone--or Something-and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means "not to look back," and "to take no thought for the morrow."
Dag Hammarskjold

2009-03-09T22:39:00.002-04:00

How far is the American right is going to go in marginalizing itself during the Obama era?

Here is Andrew Sullivan's response to Roger Kimball:

Obama's predecessor secretly invoked the power to suspend the First and Fourth Amendments for seven years, authorized the seizure and torture of American citizens, launched two decade-long wars of attrition, doubled the national debt, presided over the worst financial bubble since the 1930s, provided the weakest level of economic growth in decades, and left the US in the grip of the steepest depression since the 1930s. But after five weeks, it's Obama who should be impeached?
The New Republic

2009-03-07T09:15:00.004-05:00

HOPE: Opportunity in the Midst of Crisis

''Yes, this is a moment of challenge for our country,'' Obama said. ''But we've experienced great trials before. And with every test, each generation has found the capacity to not only endure, but to prosper -- to discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.''

And yet some endure but do not prosper.

2009-03-03T10:13:00.002-05:00

FREE US

We’re all captured by it in various ways. But we’re captive to a power. That’s the way I want us to think about sin: not as something so much that I do as something that I’m captured by and that I don’t even recognize as captivity.
Stanley Hauerwas

2009-03-03T08:28:00.000-05:00

DOWN 52.3 PERCENT IN 17 MONTHS

The S.& P. 500 has now fallen below, and the Dow is close to, the levels that prevailed on Dec. 5, 1996, when Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, inquired in a speech, “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

It was a question that has been answered over the last 17 months. During that period, the Dow has fallen 52.3 percent, a larger percentage decline than in any bear market since the Great Depression, but nowhere near the 89 percent collapse that took less than three years to complete after the 1929 high.
NYT

2009-03-02T13:58:00.001-05:00

REDEMPTION

HAVING been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old.

In heaven at his manour I him sought :
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts ;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts :
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of theeves and murderers : there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

George Herbert

2009-03-02T11:02:00.002-05:00

AN EERIE CORRELATION

Mr. Bernanke cited (in 2005) “the depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets (which, among other things, have allowed households easy access to housing wealth).” Depth, yes. But sophistication? Well, you could say that American bankers, empowered by a quarter-century of deregulatory zeal, led the world in finding sophisticated ways to enrich themselves by hiding risk and fooling investors.

And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another. All three nations are in deep crisis now.
Paul Krugman

EERIE FACT
American International Group Inc. managed to lose $62 billion in just 92 days. That's nearly $470,000 a minute. And it's more money than Bill Gates' net worth. The insurance giant's quarterly loss reported Monday was the biggest in corporate history.

2009-02-28T19:36:00.005-05:00

A COMMON CULTURAL HERITAGE

“Americans share a common historical and cultural heritage in which racism has played and still plays a dominant role. Because of this shared experience, we also inevitably share many ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that attach significance to an individual’s race and induce negative feelings and opinions about nonwhites. To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, we are all racists. At the same time, most of us are unaware of our racism. We do not recognize the ways in which our cultural experience has influenced our beliefs about race or the occasions on which those beliefs affect our actions.”
Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller & Thomas. Critical Race Theory. Page 237

2009-02-27T16:10:00.005-05:00

SO LONG, Milton Friedman. Hello, James Tobin.

After a three-decade run, the free-market philosophies of Friedman that shaped U.S. policy are being eclipsed by the pro- government ideas of Tobin, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate who brought John Maynard Keynes into the modern era.

Tobin’s stamp is on the $787 billion stimulus signed by President Barack Obama, former students and colleagues say. His philosophies are influencing Austan Goolsbee, a former Tobin student advising Obama, and Ben S. Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve. Unlike Friedman, Tobin provides guidance for today’s problems, said Paul Krugman, a Princeton University economist.

“Hard-line doctrines don’t seem very appropriate at this troubled moment,” said Krugman, a New York Times columnist who also worked with Tobin at Yale from 1977 to 1979. “Tobin was never a guru in the way Milton Friedman was; he never had legions of Samurai ready to spring to the defense of his theories, but that’s part of why he is so relevant right now.”

The decision by Bernanke last year to invoke the Fed’s emergency powers and put mortgages and other assets on the central bank’s balance sheet “is pure Tobin,” Krugman said. Bernanke cited Tobin’s 1969 essay on monetary theory in a 2004 paper discussing options available to the Federal Reserve for stimulating the economy when interest rates approach zero.

Tobin’s experience of the depression as a teenager in the 1930s gave him a lifelong loathing of unemployment.

‘Livid’ Response

“As a young professor I did a paper where I analyzed the optimal unemployment rate,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York, who knew Tobin at Yale. “Tobin went livid over the idea. To him the optimal unemployment rate was zero.”

Like Keynes, Tobin was an advocate for the role of government in maintaining full employment, said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas in Austin. The current economic and financial crisis has validated that philosophy, said Galbraith, a former Tobin student and the son of the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who was a friend of Tobin.

“It’s clear that the position that the federal government has a responsibility for the level of employment, for the economy, has prevailed,” Galbraith said. “The position that the Fed can walk away from the level of employment has completely collapsed. That was the absolutely dominant position coming out of the University of Chicago.”

In contrast to the Friedman-influenced proponents of tax cuts, deregulation and tight control of the money supply, followers of Tobin are more receptive to government intervention in the economy, including stimulus spending.
Bloomberg.Com

2009-02-24T21:31:00.004-05:00

ANOTHER CASUALTY OF DEREGULATION

Sullenberger, a 58-year-old who joined a US Airways predecessor in 1980, told the House aviation subcommittee that his pay has been cut 40 percent in recent years and his pension has been terminated and replaced with a promise "worth pennies on the dollar" from the federally created Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. These cuts followed a wave of airline bankruptcies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks compounded by the current recession, he said.

"The bankruptcies were used by some as a fishing expedition to get what they could not get in normal times," Sullenberger said of the airlines. He said the problems began with the deregulation of the industry in the 1970s.

The reduced compensation has placed "pilots and their families in an untenable financial situation," Sullenberger said. "I do not know a single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps."

The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, the air traffic controller who handled the flight and aviation experts to examine what safety lessons could be learned from the accident.

Sullenberger's copilot Jeffrey B. Skiles said unless federal laws are revised to improve labor-management relations "experienced crews in the cockpit will be a thing of the past." And Sullenberger added that without experienced pilots "we will see negative consequences to the flying public."

2009-02-19T23:00:00.001-05:00

ON THE NY POST CARTOON

Such images are harmful on a number of levels, he said. “Even people who do not harbor deep-seated prejudices, because they have stereotypes deeply embedded in their consciousness, may react unconsciously when those associations are triggered,” he said.

Professor Rojecki rejected Mr. Allan’s assertion that the cartoon was devoid of racial content. “It strains credulity to imagine that there is any association between a chimpanzee that was shot because it had attacked someone and a bill that has successfully passed through Congress,” he said. “It makes no sense. What possible explanation could there be?”

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a professor of global studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture” (Yale University Press, 1995), said, “I agree the cartoon is racist, without a doubt.”

Professor Pieterse, who is Dutch, said that portrayal of non-Westerners as primates became well-established in both the United States and Europe in the late 19th century, and has affected not only blacks, but also the Irish and Chinese, for example.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” he said of the cartoon, “and I think people are concerned because it sets a nasty, mean, very aggressive tone. You can’t get any lower.”
NYT

2009-02-13T22:12:00.001-05:00

ARE WE RISING TO THE CHALLENGE?

It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

There’s still time to turn this around. But Mr. Obama has to be stronger looking forward. Otherwise, the verdict on this crisis might be that no, we can’t.
Paul Krugman

2009-02-05T09:36:00.004-05:00

ETHICS IS MOSTLY BEING REMINDED

President Obama reminded us “in this winter of our hardship” to remember Thomas Paine’s words before the Battle of Trenton: “Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

2009-02-03T09:38:00.001-05:00

BARELY DENTED BY HUMAN ANGUISH
Meanwhile, Wall Street’s culture of excess seems to have been barely dented by the crisis. “Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!

Paul Krugman

2009-01-30T20:49:00.002-05:00

ALL THE REST IS POSTURING
And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Søren Kierkegaard

2009-01-29T13:46:00.006-05:00

LIVE IN FAITH AND HOPE,
though it be in darkness, for in this darkness God protects the soul. Cast your care upon God for you are God's and God will not forget you.
John of the Cross

Show us you mercy;
Clothe your prophets with righteousness;
Let your people sing with joy.
Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;
For only in you can we live in safety.
Lord, keep this nation under your care;
And guide us into the way of justice and truth.
Let your way be known upon the earth.
Your saving health among all nations.
Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.
Create in us clean hearts, O God;
And sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

Adapted, Book of Common Prayer

2009-01-27T19:41:00.004-05:00

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE A WISE HEART?

I pray much to have a wise heart, and perhaps the rediscovery of Lady Julian of Norwich will help...

One of her most telling and central convictions is her orientation to what one might call an eschatological secret, the hidden dynamism which is at work already and by which 'all manner of thing shall be well.' This 'secret,' this act which the Lord keeps hidden, is really the full fruit of the Parousia. It is not just that 'He comes,' but He comes with this secret to reveal, He comes with this final answer to all the world's anguish, this answer which is already decided, but which we cannot discover (and which, since we think we have reasoned it all out anyway) we have stopped trying to discover.

Actually, her life was lived in the belief in this 'secret,' the 'great deed' that the Lord will do on the Last Day, not a deed of destruction and revenge, but of mercy and of life, when all partial expectations will be exploded and everything will be made right. It is the great deed of 'the end,' which is still secret, but already fully at work in the world, in spite of all its sorrow, the great deed 'ordained by Our Lord from without beginning...'

This is, for her, the heart of theology: not solving the contradiction, but remaining in the midst of it, in peace, knowing that it is fully solved, but that the solution is secret, and will never be guessed until it is revealed.

To have a "wise heart," it seems to me, is to live centered on this dynamism and this secret hope- this hoped-for secret. It is the key to our life, but as long as we are alive we must see that we do not have this key: it is not at our disposal. Christ has it, in us, for us. We have the key insofar as we believe in Him, and are one with Him. So this is it: the 'wise heart' remains in hope and in contradiction, in sorrow and in joy, fixed on the secret and the 'great deed' which alone gives Christian life its true scope and dimensions!
The wise heart lives in Christ.

Thomas Merton

2009-01-24T18:11:00.002-05:00

ON IDENTITY
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair; but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Thomas Merton

2009-01-21T19:41:00.003-05:00

Black, Brown and White

Rev. Lowry transformed these words (below) from the orginal in his benediction. That's what faith can do!

"This little song that i’m singin’ about,
People you know it’s true
If you’re black and gotta work for a living,
This is what they will say to you,

They says, “if you was white, should be all right,
If you was brown, stick around,
But as you’s black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back”

I was in a place one night
They was all having fun
They was all buyin’ beer and wine,
But they would not sell me none

They said, “if you was white, should be all right,
If you was brown, stick around,
But if you black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back”

Me and a man was workin’ side by side
This is what it meant
They was paying him a dollar an hour,
And they was paying me fifty cent

They said, “if you was white, ‘t should be all right,
If you was brown, could stick around,
But as you black, hmm boy, get back, get back, get back”

I went to an employment office,
Got a number ‘n’ i got in line
They called everybody’s number,
But they never did call mine

They said, “if you was white, should be all right,
If you was brown, could stick around,
But as you black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back”

I hope when sweet victory,
With my plough and hoe
Now i want you to tell me brother,
What you gonna do about the old jim crow?
Now if you was white, should be all right,
If you was brown, could stick around,
But if you black, whoa brother, get back, get back, get back

Bill Broonnzy

2009-01-20T22:48:00.003-05:00

NOW HERE'S A BENEDICTION

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.

Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.

We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.

He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.

Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Amen. Amen.

Rev. Joseph Lowery

2009-01-20T13:33:00.002-05:00

THERE IT IS!

2009-01-18T20:22:00.023-05:00

WORDS OF WISDOM THAT WEAR WELL FOR THE INAUGU- RATION

God is the interrogator of the human - not the other way around...
God challenges humanity to be fully human:

Human freedom only comes into view, and begins to be achieved when God's challenge is heard and grasped,

The world is unredeemed (i.e., the world remains in bondage to dehumanizing gods, ways, and structures): The task of the religious community and the religious person is to share in redeeming the world, or better, in preparing the world for God's redemption of it (i.e., in helping, or preparing, the world to become free from slavery to dehumanization and idolatry),

Full human dignity comes only through full recognition and acceptance of the fullness of human responsibility,

The deepest agony is the agony of spiritually stunted life.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say No to oneself.

Trivialization of life, vulgarization of culture, and false worship of the self, help destroy the capacity for responsibility and for self-discipline, and thus help destroy human dignity.

The need is for "audacity," "guts," "defiance."

Conformity to the American temper, in many of its manifestations, must be resisted for the sake of our humanity

The fundamental nature of faithful relationship to God thus also means that the community and person of faith are:

Deeply and painfully sensitized to the injustice and cruelty and absence of compassion in the world, and in themselves.

They are appalled and stunned by the human abdication of itself to evil inclination

They bear in themselves the frightful agony of human life.

The community and individual of faith recognize that they, too, share responsibility for the anguish of humanity.

A good conscience is demonic,

Contrition and humility are merely acts of recognition of one's true life.

And, ultimately, we are not taught to feel accused, to bear a sense of boundless guilt. We are asked to feel elated, bred to meet the tasks that never end.

Every child is a prince; every man and woman is obliged to feel the world was created for their sake.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

LET FREEDOM RING
Toward the end of the concert that drew half a million people to cheer Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger (singing a spirited "This Land Is Your Land"), Mary J. Blige, Stevie Wonder and the president-elect, U2 took the stage.

Before launching into "Pride (In The Name Of Love," the band's tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,) Bono noted that the crowd was gathered on the mall where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Let freedom ring. On this spot where we're standing 46 years ago Dr. King had a dream. On Tuesday, that dream comes to pass."

" "This is not just an American dream," he said, adding that it was "also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream... an Israeli dream... and also a Palestinian dream."

The Nation

2009-01-17T18:41:00.002-05:00

POEM FOR THE PASSING OF THE OLD MEN

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."
William Butler Yeats

2009-01-14T09:03:00.006-05:00

KNOW HOPE

The modern churches and present-day Christians must, if they are to qualify to address and act in this world amid all the technologies, institutional powers, dehumanizing threats, frightful dangers of extermination, and ruthless idols which encompass humanity, trust the gospel.
Bill Stringfellow

2009-01-10T19:28:00.002-05:00

Excellent Article on Gaza Conflict
Basically says that Hamas's violations are no justification for Israel's disproportionate actions. "Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem."

2009-01-09T12:29:00.003-05:00

ON BEING A SKEPTIC OF THE MYTHS OF OUR DAY

H. Richard Niebuhr is right when he says: This is "the great overarching myth ...the almost unconquerable picture in the mind"--the mind that reaches into us all, that we all share with our culture to some degree: in the "past forgotten, dead generations." And there is an "image of myself" and all society "coming to that future when there is no more future." Niebuhr calls this, in all its forms, our "mythology of death."

Because we have been overwhelmed by the myth of death; because our culture holds death to be THE END, the everlasting, eternal end, we cannot, many of us, sing, tenderly and vulnerably with tears streaming down our faces about the everlasting arms; we cannot sing "leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms"; we cannot sing with Martin Luther King, Jr., "Precious Lord, take my hand"; we cannot sing with the Black churches..."This is my story, This is my song..."

And so the church must become the skeptic--we must become the skeptics-- skeptical of the powerful myths of our day which often are at the bottom of both our beer commercials and our methods of literary criticism, our politics and our very views of human well being.

Segregating life and death--and living in a culture that holds to the myth of death as the last word--we segregate joy and sorrow. And we segregate them desperately... trying to keep the vision of nothingness out of our days and ways; trying to keep sorrow out of our joy.
Coleman B. Brown

2009-01-06T11:00:00.023-05:00

A LITURGY OF EPIPHANY

Come, Creator; come, Jesus Christ; come, Holy Spirit!—be in us and shine upon us this day. Be in us compassion for the broken heart, and healing for the broken bones, and grace for the day's journey. Be in us silence for listening to the truths of heaven in our midst.

Gracious God, find in us those places where we truly repent and receive the confession of our hearts where we have wounded the innocent, betrayed the just, denied the true, even ourselves. Make our anguish real, our return steady. Help us stand firm against the evil in and around us, even as we falter and fall again; hold us in thy everlasting compassion, and transform us in the image of thy joy. Amen.

There is the mystery of the love of the heart toward God. When it happens in a person, it is a free uncalculating affair not unlike falling in love for the first time. It can make an ordinary person into a St. Francis; and when it occurs among a whole people, most extraordinary things follow among neighbors and between enemies. The love of God that the heart knows is very tangible. Just as the lover must somehow shower the beloved with gifts and acts of freedom and graciousness, so those who love God with the heart set about finding ways to please the Beloved.

There is no special place to begin, no order in which this compassion is shown. It can begin simply by loving the world God has made—an always awakening to the spaciousness of daylight, the passion of colors, the touch of winds, the sing-song of sparrows. It includes kindness toward all humanity and being; because every person is God's, named by God and with a purpose and a meaning given by God. So the heart's love toward God encompasses all that Jesus said about love and justice--feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the prisoner. This is not just a matter of duty. It is a way of entering into God's ethos of forgiveness and eternal light.

2009-01-04T20:51:00.002-05:00

IT COMES DOWN TO DEFENDING HUMAN DIGNITY

"Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries -- from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan -- are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human."
Gleen Greenwald

"Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst". A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as "coercive interrogation" only when Americans do it to Muslims."
Andrew Sullivan

2008-12-31T15:09:00.000-05:00

WHAT IS A YEAR?

Were you to board a spaceship, head out from earth at 99.999999 percent of light speed, travel for six months and then head back home at the same speed, your motion would slow your clock, relative to those that remain stationary on earth, so that you'd be one year older upon your return — while everyone on earth would have aged about 7,000 years. Or, were you to venture into space again and spend a year hovering a dozen feet above the edge of a black hole, whose mass was 1,000 times that of the sun, the strong gravitational field would slow your clock so much that on your return to earth, you'd find that more than a million years had elapsed...
NYT

2008-12-26T10:05:00.002-05:00

THE WORK OF CHRISTMAS

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flock,
then the work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among brother and sisters,
to make music in the heart.
Howard Thurman

The Cloisters at Iona

2008-12-21T20:13:00.003-05:00

FOR THE LONGEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR

Genuine community is born only after we are first overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others...and if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world... Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight...The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Tell me how you search and I'll tell you what you're searching for.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

2008-12-17T09:35:00.002-05:00

THE COURAGE TO BE

To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings

2008-12-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

THE IONA PARADOX

Several years ago I spent the winter on a small (one by three mile) rocky island in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Scotland-- Iona. St. Columba first brought Christianity from Ireland in the 560's, which he then used as his base to evangelize Scotland and Scandanavia. Since then various monastic communities, crofters, fisherman, seagulls and presbyterians have inhabited this bleak but beautiful isle. About fifty residents and guests lived, worked and worshipped at the retreat center when I was there.

IONA contains some of the oldest black surface rock on the earth, and some of the worst weather. Huge storms with gale force winds would blow in from the north Atlantic and rage for days. I learned to walk bent over to compensate for the 50 mph gusts. Occasionally the driving sleet, snow and rain would stop and there'd be a brief period of calm and "brightness." We'd run outside to savor the weak horizontal light. Sometimes amidst our "sun dance" there were even wee glimpses of rainbow. But mostly it was absolutely the worst weather I have ever seen.

During one five day storm the ferry from the island of Mull was cancelled for the week, and we had to live off food stocks: endless tea, oatmeal (with salt not sugar), thick stale bread and old yellow pudding. When I grew weary of caffeinated tea and asked for the herbal variety the locals laughed, "The Yank wants Herb tea!" Later in the month when I came down with the inevitable flu and was bedridden, friends somehow found and brought me fresh green salad with a slice of tomato-- a miracle!

TWICE daily we trudged though the darkness and cold and gathered to worship in the abbey. There was no heat and only candlelight (my job was to light the candles, so I better not be late). There was no organ, just the sound of the wind howling outside. I remember singing with that small company, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel, to ransom captive Israel, who mourns in lonely exile here... Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel."

Strangely the severity of weather and life seemed to contribute to the warmth of the Spirit and community. Acknowledging the existential darkness, allowed the Light to truly shine. Why is that?

I believe the Iona Paradox can be stated as follows: the more we acknowledge our hurt and darkness the more we may receive the divine-human light. And the inverse is equally true: the less we acknowledge our hurt and darkness (and project it on to others), the less we are open to the true light of forgiveness and hope. In the very things that we ignore, reject and even despise as dirty and strange, God's incarnate light and presence is shining deep in the flesh.

IN other words, God is in the wound. The prophet was right, "The people who walked in deep darkness have seen a great light; those who have lived in a land of deep darkness-- on them light has shined."

2008-12-13T20:34:00.006-05:00

WHERE WAS CONGRESS?
(Or Democracy For the Few)

Senator Chuck Schumer, a member of the Banking and Finance Committees, repeatedly took steps to protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules, a review of his record shows.

He succeeded in limiting efforts to regulate credit-rating agencies, sponsored legislation that cut fees paid by Wall Street firms to finance government oversight, pushed to allow banks to have lower capital reserves and called for the revision of regulations to make corporations’ balance sheets more transparent.

“Since the financial meltdown, people have been asking, ‘Where was Congress? Why didn’t they see this coming? Why didn’t they provide better oversight?’ ” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “And the answer for some, including Senator Schumer, is that they were actually too busy pursuing a deregulatory agenda. Their focus was on how we have to lighten up regulation on Wall Street.”

“He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public,” said John C. Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group, the giant mutual fund house.
NYT

And Shumer's a Democrat!

2008-12-12T15:34:00.002-05:00

HUNGRY ENOUGH FOR TRUTH?

When her longtime New York Times colleague David Rosenbaum was murdered as he walked near his Washington home in 2006, Robin Toner described his approach to reporting in words that applied equally to hers: “He believed that, behind every arcane tax provision or line in an appropriations bill, there were real people getting something, or getting something taken away. He believed that there was, on most stories, something approximating truth out there if you were smart enough and hungry enough to find it.”

2008-12-10T19:52:00.001-05:00

POWER TO BE becomes evident in the continual struggles of being against nonbeing. Nonbeing is all aspects that negate and destroy being which include conformism which destroys uniqueness and originality; hostility which shrinks courage, generousity and capacity to understand the other; destructiveness; and death. A life process is the more powerful the more nonbeing it can include in its self-affirmation, without being destroyed by it.
Paul Tillich

2008-12-08T21:00:00.002-05:00

IN THIS SILENCE

"Become nothing before God, learn to keep silent; in this silence is the beginning, which is first to seek God's kingdom."
Soren Kierkegaard

2008-12-06T21:25:00.005-05:00

When a Job Disappears So Does Health Care

The latest estimate of the number of uninsured is for 2007, when 45.7 million people accounting for 15.3 percent of the population, were uninsured.

Harvey Brenner, a professor of public health said that three decades of research had shown a correlation between the condition of the economy and human health, including life expectancy.

“In recessions, with declines in national income and increases in unemployment you often see increases in mortality from heart disease, cancer, psychiatric illnesses and other conditions.”
NYT

2008-12-06T14:58:00.009-05:00

Giving Voice to the Forsaken

"Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful." Amy Goodman

Three Examples of Gulag Americana

Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands
Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody
Family Struggles in Vain to Help Suffering Detainee

May the change begin now.

2008-12-04T21:32:00.005-05:00

The Boxer

I am just a poor boy, though my story is seldom told.
I have squandered my resistance,
For a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises.
All lies and jest.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

When I left my home and my family I was no more than a boy,
In the company of strangers,
In the quiet of the railway station, runnin' scared.
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters,
Where the ragged people go.
Lookin' for the places, only they would know...

Asking only workman's wages I come lookin' for a job,
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue.
I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome,
I took some comfort there.

And I’m laying out my winter clothes, and wishing I was gone, goin’ home
Where the new york city winters aren’t bleedin’ me, leadin’ me goin' home.

In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade,
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down,
Or cut him 'til he cried out in his anger and his shame,
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains.
Lie-la-lie ...

Paul Simon

2008-12-02T14:27:00.006-05:00

Living With The Fragments

This is one of my all time favorite quotes:

Man is a fragment and a riddle to himself. The more he experiences and knows that fact, the more he is really human. Paul experienced the breakdown of a system of life and thought which he believed to be a whole, a perfect truth without riddle or gaps. He then found himself buried under the pieces of his knowledge and morals. But Paul never tried again to build up a new, comfortable house out of the pieces. He dwelt with the pieces. He realized always that fragments remain fragments, even if one attempts to reorganize them. The unity to which they belong lies beyond them; it is grasped through hope, but not face to face.

How could Paul endure life, as it lay in fragments? He endured it because the fragments bore a new meaning to him. The pictures in the mirror pointed to something new for him: they anticipated the perfect, the reality of love. Through the pieces of his knowledge and morality, love appeared to him. And the power of love transformed the tormenting riddles into symbols of truth, the tragic fragments into symbols of the whole."
Paul Tillich

2008-11-29T22:42:00.000-05:00

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
Fyodor Dostoevsky

2008-11-26T22:32:00.000-05:00

KEEP WATCH, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.
Book of Common Prayer

2008-11-25T12:59:00.001-05:00

Big Jump Foreseen in Ranks of the Poor

Rising unemployment could push an additional 7.5 million to 10.3 million United States residents below the federal poverty line over the next two or three years, a research group has estimated, based on the experience of the last three recessions and the latest projections of job losses.

If the analysis is correct, this would be the largest jump in the poverty rate since the prolonged recession of the early 1980s, when the number of poor people climbed to 35 million from 26 million over four years. Milder recessions in the early 1990s and in 2001 caused significant but lesser increases.

In 2007, according to the Census Bureau, 37.3 million residents, or 12.5 percent of the population, lived below the poverty line, which is currently $21,200 for a family of four. But economists say the total is sure to rise over the coming years, and if the private budget center’s estimates hold true, the number of poor people could approach 50 million.

The budget center’s estimates assume that unemployment will rise to 9 percent by the end of 2009.
NYT

2008-11-25T09:12:00.001-05:00

Source and End of Life

"Jesus Christ is the assurance that all of life, the life of every human and the rest of creation, originates in and ends in the life of God. Your life, or mine, or that of anybody, issues from the word of God. This is and remains the essential truth about you or me or anybody, no matter whatever else may seem to be true."
Bill Stringfellow

2008-11-22T10:55:00.003-05:00

Watching and Listening For God to Speak

Whatever energies I may or may not have, I know one thing for certain: that I could not devote them to anything else I should think entirely worth doing. Indeed nothing else seems interesting enough, nothing to repay the labor, but the telling of my fellow human beings about the one who is the truth, and to know whom is the life.

Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place of truths; and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste.

Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go farther, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny him.
George MacDonald

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening. That is very hard for me to do because I am an addicted speaker, thinker, reader. It is also only during the last few years that I have begun to discover something about what watching and listening involve.

I am talking about prayer -prayer not as speaking to God, which in a scattered way I do many times a day because I cannot help doing it, but prayer as being deeply silent, as watching and listening for God to speak.
Fred Buechner

2008-11-19T16:59:00.021-05:00

Towards a "Structure" in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel

I. Above all, the Unity of God (The Shema)

A) God - beyond all dichotomies

B) God - in Whom both the fullness of Justice and the Fullness of Mercy

1) God against all injustice and fatalism
2) But "Will God not accept us in all our frailty and weakness?"

C) Through the Unity of God, the unity of God and human; The call "to hold God and the human in one thought at one time."

D) The Unity of God destroys the notion of religion or morality as compartments of life: The whole of life is in the purview of faith and ethics.

E) God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance,

II. Why is the relationship of the human to God crucial?

A) Because God is God.

B) Because the central human question is: "Who needs humanity?"

C) Because "a godless people is bound to become a satanic people."

III. How is the relationship with God entered and sustained?

A) Through the community:

1) A "Jew who abandons the people of Israel detaches herself from the God of Israel."

2) "He or she who goes their own way abandons the Jewish way."

B) Through words!...through learning!...through Torah!

1) The words must be words out of the depth, hallowed, words given by and in search for the Living God.

2) Learning, ultimately, is not unto comprehension, nor unto utility: Learning is unto reverence for God.

3) The study of Torah is involvement "in the dialogue of God and the human"; it is to sanctify time (find true freedom in time).

4) "Study is a form of worship."

5) "True learning is a way of relating oneself to something which is both holy and universal."

6) "Learning is life."

7) "The essential value of the intellectual experience is the experience itself."

8) Therefore, by implication, it is blasphemy and self-destruction to cut the mental life down to one's own size, down to the size of one's ego.

9) The "tragedy" of our generation is that we do "not know how to study."

C) Through personal life! for "there is no vicarious Judaism; "there is nothing in the universal that is not contained in the particular.",

1) Through willingness to suffer, and glory in ultimate questions!
2) Through personal, spiritual, intellectual, moral embarrassment!
3) Through willingness to enter the human depths,
4) Through perplexity and despair,
5) Through the sense of personal inadequacy,
6) Through the discovery one's indebtedness - indebtedness to others, and to God.
7) Through effrontery! audacity - through an overcoming of the bashfulness bred of fatalism (and, in turn, breeding that fatalism further),
8) Thus Heschel emphasizes an education, words, learning, a study of Torah which reaches the inner man or woman: The inner person must be saved!

D) Through action! personal and corporate:

1) "Thou art commanded, therefore thou canst."
2) "Human good deeds are single acts in the long drama of redemption, and every deed counts."
3) The sense for the ultimate preciousness of life comes through acts of justice and mercy
4) The just and merciful action "is wiser than the heart."
5) Actions expressing justice, mercy, humility may change one's motives, and bring one closer to faith,
6) But, of course, good action requires knowledge of the good required, knowledge about what to do; therefore, the person of faith:

a) Studies (above).
b) And Observes the commandments and teachings ever more thoroughly.

IV. What is the fundamental nature of faithful relationship to God? It is entrance into discovery that:

A) God is the answer to the central human question, Who needs humanity?

B) God is the crucial "problem" of human life (Much of the time persons ask, who wants to be needed?)

1) Not the problem of good and evil.
2) Not the problem of human needs,

a) Who knows his true needs?
b) Clarification of norms, ethical standards, and meeting the demands of these God-given and God-illuminated demands is the "problem," above clarifying and meeting our "needs."

C) God is the interrogator of the human - not the other way around: "Religion consists of God's question and the human's answer."

D) God challenged humanity to be fully human,

1) Human freedom only comes into view, and begins to be achieved when God's challenge is heard and grasped,

2) The world is unredeemed (i.e., the world remains in bondage to dehumanizing gods, ways, and structures): The task of the religious community and the religious person is to share in redeeming the world, or better, in preparing the world for God's redemption of it (i.e., in helping, or preparing, the world to become free from slavery to dehumanization and idolatry),

3) Full human dignity comes only through full recognition and acceptance of the fullness of human responsibility,

a) The deepest agony is the agony of spiritually stunted life.
b) "Self-respect is the fruit of discipline, the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say No to oneself."

c) We are today being "pampered," spoiled: We have asked too little of humanity.

d) Trivialization of life, vulgarization of culture, and false worship of the self (p. 200), help destroy the capacity for responsibility and for self-discipline, and thus help destroy human dignity.

e) The need is for "audacity," "guts," "defiance."

f) Conformity to the American temper, in many of its manifestations, must be resisted for the sake of our humanity

E) The fundamental nature of faithful relationship to God thus also means that the community and person of faith are:

1) Deeply and painfully sensitized to the injustice and cruelty and absence of compassion in the world, and in themselves.

a) They are appalled and stunned by the human abdication of itself to evil inclination

b) They bear in themselves the frightful agony of human life.

c) The community and individual of faith recognize that they, too, share responsibility for the anguish of humanity.

i) A good conscience is demonic,
ii) Contrition and humility are merely acts of recognition of one's true life,

2) Yet they are moving from a life of suspicion to one, precisely, of faith,

3) And, ultimately, we are not taught to feel accused, to bear a sense of boundless guilt. We are asked to feel elated, bred to meet the tasks that never end.

"Every child is a prince; every man and woman is obliged to feel the world was created for their sake."

With thanks to Coleman Brown

2008-11-19T15:30:00.014-05:00

Words and Prayers for the Season

We know inside ourselves our own darknesses; or, if we do not know them or understand them, we feel them brooding in us as sadness and silences, fears whispering, echoing chasms of anguish where we seem to stand at the brink of despair. And the winter that comes surrounds us visibly with the cold and the dark that invisibly we live with every day and in all seasons. And in this time the cry of Advent reverberates across our lives...

"Watch-man, tell us of the night, what are its signs of promise?" The answer that comes is not given by human-kind for such an answer would only be darkness speaking to darkness. Rather there comes a transcendent Word, an eternal shout of joy, a promise signed in heaven itself. There comes the word of divine comfort. In our sophistications we may not hear it, we may turn from it, we may despise it. If so, our dark remains dark, and we continue to be of all people the most miserable.

O Lord, the watch-persons of ten thousand times ten thousand cities cry to the winter night the news of thy coming. Even so, we praise thee, Word of Light to our darkness, Word of Peace to our warfare, Word of Love and Justice to our fear. Let carols sing, let prayers adore, let the whole earth rejoice and declare thee. Thou art fire and garland. Thou art the good shepherd and the true king. With angels and archangels we adore thee.

O God, we are strangers and sojourners, except thou art with us. We are no people, except we are thy people. Our very days are lost, except we find them in thee. We know no mercy, except we receive thy mercy. Come to us. Sing in us new songs. Teach our prayers our needs. Give us thyself. Be our defender against the evil day and the false prosperity. And set our feet on the paths that run toward Bethlehem.

We are making ready, Lord. Our hearts are hillsides listening. Our minds are hastening footsteps. Our bodies are a cradle. Our whole being is praise and rejoicing. And unto thee be the glory, O Word made flesh, in whose peace we are secure, in whose mercy we are forgiven, and in whose love we are redeemed, forever and ever. Amen.

2008-11-13T13:36:00.001-05:00

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Abraham Lincoln

2008-11-11T23:37:00.004-05:00

He not busy being born is busy dying.
Bob Dylan

For Example
...a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation's unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available. Drake Bennet

2008-11-08T23:26:00.000-05:00

This Was the Week

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.
Frank Rich

2008-11-05T10:33:00.002-05:00

On Possibility

When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles...We've entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

An African American has been elected President of the United States! Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people. Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care. Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps. Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice. Anything is possible.

And Forgiveness

Do not treat the Republicans in your life the way they have treated you the past eight years. Show them the grace and goodness that Barack Obama exuded throughout the campaign. Though called every name in the book, he refused to lower himself to the gutter and sling the mud back. Can we follow his example? I know, it will be hard.
Michael Moore

Well Said!

2008-11-04T23:17:00.001-05:00

President elect in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.

2008-10-31T20:29:00.000-04:00

A Doppelganger Nation

"More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself..."
Esquire

2008-10-30T21:52:00.002-04:00

"What is to give light must endure burning"
Vicktor Frankl

2008-10-28T21:09:00.001-04:00

A Prayer of Confession

Dear Lord, the sin of humanity is contagious. It is in us all. It darkens us against thy light. It fevers us before thy calm. It knots in us and aches in us as we hear thy truth. Surely we cannot heal ourselves. O thou whose forgiveness brims over all the world and whose mercies are the medicines that make all things well, forgive us this day, and let thy mercies cleanse us soul, bone, and blood; through Jesus Christ. Amen

2008-10-27T11:51:00.002-04:00

Mark Twain on Moral Courage

My Dear Sir:

But you are proceeding upon the superstition that Moral Courage and a Hankering to Learn the Truth are ingredients in the human being's makeup. Your premises being wild and foolish, you naturally and properly get wild and foolish results. If you will now reform, and in future proceed upon the sane and unchallengeable hypothesis that those two ingredients are on vacation in our race, and have been from the start, you will be able to account for some things which seem to puzzle you now.

Sincerely yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, Dec. 21, 1901.

"There are not enough morally brave men in stock. We are out of moral-courage material."
"United States of Lyncherdom"

2008-10-27T11:46:00.005-04:00

Reconciliation vs. Systematic Organization of Hatreds

In his 2004 speech Obama said, "We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States... We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we've got some gay friends in the Red States." It is a message of fundamental unity and good will, at a time when politics often resembles Henry Adams' mordant description: "the systematic organization of hatreds."
Steve Chapman

"No social and cultural moderate can be a Republican presidential ticket in the era of Rove. So McCain was left with the party that brung him - and we now know what motivates that party: fear of the other and religious fanaticism. Hence his appalling fall campaign - among the most disgusting and hollow I can remember."
Andrew Sullivan

2008-10-26T23:02:00.016-04:00

Economic Inequality Leads to Chaos

Just when the maximim inequality occurred in 1929, and now in 2008, the tipping point of economic meltdown ensued. Think about it. Excessive concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the few leads to lack of social accountability, corruption of financial integrity, and global meltdown...

Wall Street Journal

2008-10-24T20:25:00.012-04:00

New Possibilites in American Politics?!

Barack Obama is positioned to win the largest share of white voters of any Democrat in more than three decades.

The most recent two weeks of polling show 45 percent of non-Hispanic white voters support Obama — the highest number for a Democrat since 47 percent of whites backed Jimmy Carter in 1976.

71 per cent of Hispanics and 97 per cent of Blacks support Obama.

No Democrat has won a majority of white voters since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. If Obama's share holds, it would top the 43 percent of white voters who backed Bill Clinton in 1996.
Politico

2008-10-22T16:58:00.023-04:00

What Are We Learning From This Economic Crisis?

2008-10-19T22:55:00.001-04:00

The Greatest Thing

"There was a boy...
A very strange enchanted boy.
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea,
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he.

And then one day,
One magic day, he passed my way.
And while we spoke of many things,
Fools and kings,
This he said to me,
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."

2008-10-19T14:54:00.008-04:00

By the Skin of Our Teeth

Don't be fooled by the polls and pundits. This is going to be a very very close election, right down to the last day. The best way to finish is with sweat and prayer.

As Josh Marshall observes:

"Stripped down to its components McCain's message to voters is this: "Don't forget. He's definitely black. And he may be a terrorist." That's the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting -- through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether..."

2008-10-18T23:46:00.002-04:00

On the Need For a True Spirituality

I can't say it better than this:

"It seems to me that a doctrine of human innocence that has grown since the eighteenth century is at least as hard to swallow as the doctrine of the original sin. We tend to say today, particularly in educational institutions, that "humanity has problems" but that we ourselves are not the problem; but I'm not so sure. The repression in part that you speak of is invited by a doctrine of human innocence. Our atomized individualism-and the sources of that are multiple but certainly our economic system and the need to be able to function as a saleable individual has led to a kind of repression.

The invitation of culture continually is to make the self-interested individual the center, and when the self, in that sense, is the center, it will be under enormous pressure to repress some of the most important things about our existence. Our narcissism requires that we repress matters that disclose our need for humility, for forgiveness, our need for others, let alone the "other."

The authority of explanatory knowledge has led us to a sense of an empty universe. Explanations tend to empty, don't they? Contemplation needs fullness. When we can see through everything, there's nothing left to see. We are in a situation in which we can't bear either our own finitude and apparent insignificance, or the awe and reverence necessary for the rediscovery of our significance.

Our significance is something with which we're endowed. It's very hard for me to understand how it is self derived. If we have no awe or reverence for the mystery of why we came into being, I tend to wonder how long we can find significance in our own being. A sense of personal significance for your life in a way that you can't get away from is a powerful anchor in times of terrible uncertainty.

Also, when a sense of personal significance is lost, when I'm only accountable to rnyself, the question arises (as Lucy in the Charlie Brown comic strip asked) "what are the others for?" People begin to think: "what is this infinite worth of the individual? I guess we made it up." Then there is a denigration of our humanity that is hard to stop without some kind of recovery of spirituality.

One other thing about repression. It seems to me that we repress these questions of meaning because of the awesome questions of justice which they raise. Jefferson (who never released his slaves) nevertheless during the slavery period said something like "I tremble to think that God is just." Spirituality divorced from the question of justice is still a thing of repression. The awful disparities of our society, or our world, lead to repression of the question of justice, and thus to repression of attention to a human community built on love and justice."

Coleman Barr Brown

2008-10-18T21:58:00.007-04:00

Empirical Based Reality

Here are some words which bring us back to economic reality from the kind of ideological bubbles and cynical fundamentalisms which reined for the last eight years:

"What is Mr. Walker’s approach to subprime crisis today? It is to use the crisis as a rhetorical springboard, in order to divert the conversation back to what he calls the “super sub-prime crisis associated with the federal government’s deteriorating finances…”

But the fact is, the subprime crisis is real. The collapse of interbank lending is real. The collapsing stock market is real. The disintegration of the financial system is real. The collapse of the housing sector is real. The credit crunch and the recession are real. You can see this in the interest rate spreads and in the credit that is unavailable at any price.

Mr. Walker’s “super subprime crisis” of the federal government is not real. It is a pure figment of the imagination. It is something Mr. Walker sees in his mind’s eye. He sees it in his budget projections. He sees it in his balance sheets, which are the oddest balance sheets I’ve ever seen, because they have all liabilities and no assets..."

James Galbraith

2008-10-13T17:55:00.010-04:00

Political Hope

My approach to the polls today and the present party in the executive office can be summarized as follows:
"You can fool all of the people some of the time.
You can even fool some of the people all of the time.
But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time."
LORD hear our prayer.

2008-10-12T21:46:00.005-04:00

Harvey Gets One Right

"In days of old, seers entered a trance state and then informed anxious seekers what kind of mood the gods were in, and whether this was an auspicious time to begin a journey, get married, or start a war... Today The Market's fickle will is clarified by daily reports from Wall Street and other sensory organs of finance. Thus we can learn on a day-to-day basis that The Market is "apprehensive," "relieved," "nervous," or even at times "jubilant." On the basis of this revelation awed adepts make critical decisions about whether to buy or sell. Like one of the devouring gods of old, The Market -- aptly embodied in a bull or a bear -- must be fed and kept happy under all circumstances. True, at times its appetite may seem excessive -- a $35 billion bailout here, a $50 billion one there --but the alternative to assuaging its hunger is too terrible to contemplate."
Harvey Cox, 1999

2008-10-11T20:47:00.018-04:00

With Heart, Mind, and Soul

One reflection on religion and politics today.

Why is contemporary Christianity in America so lacking in intellectual rigor?

Yes, "the heart has reasons that reason cannot know," but the ways of God are non-rational, not irrational. The distinction is important. God gave us reason as sound and reliable, as in "faith seeking understanding." The courage to be and the courage to love includes intellectual passion. We are actually commanded to love God with heart and mind and soul. The inability to receive this wisdom is the great vice of modern and post-modern Christianity, whether it be of the left or right. As Paul would say, "They have the zeal of God, but are lacking in wisdom." It's the difference between a Niebuhr and a Falwell.

The anti-intellectual tradition in American religion is a miserable vice. It may be our undoing.

2008-09-19T19:38:00.016-04:00

Well Back to Posting Again

I will try to write here more often now as a kind of existential discipline and practice. This renewal of the covenant coincides with the arrival of a bright new laptop!

What is writing but thinking out loud on "paper," a way to give public "permanence" to fleeting thoughts and sensations. (As such it falls short of prayer).

The World is Incomplete

This world as many experience it of late reveals things as more precarious and provisional, even as "groaning." We see this in the economic order, in the environment, with bodily health, in relationships... In an instant you or I am walking (or lying) in the strange valley of deep darkness. As my friend says, "This is a time when we are anxious for our children." This is a time for crying out from the place where all true prayer begins: from the depths.

God hear our cry!

2007-12-19T16:48:00.002-05:00

A DEEP BREATH

A thankful breather in the midst of several tasks. Time to enjoy the grace of lov-ing presence with friends and family.
Two words:

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
--Emily Dickinson

"I will call her beloved, who was not beloved."
--St. Paul

2007-12-01T15:31:00.001-05:00

POEM OF THE WEEK

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

W.H. Auden

2007-11-30T14:18:00.001-05:00

HOMECOMING AND OUR TRUE HOME

My daughter and I both have bad colds. The day is bright and cool outside; inside it is time for homemade soup and naps. Below is the conclusion of one of my favorite sermons by Coleman Brown:

The word, "Home" may well arouse in us only nostalgia and loneliness; I understand that very well. Or "home" may lead us to cowardice, to betrayal of our responsibility to do justice, to resist injustice: I understand that, too.

But the symbol, the word "home" may also help open us to the rule of God, to the kingdom of heaven, to what Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed and called Beloved Community.

The New Testament writers beheld in the death of Jesus, God's purpose to bring us home to ourselves, to one another, and, yes, to God.

Home: our true home: yet how can we speak it?

Robert Frost helps me in the impossible task with his poem, "The Death of the Hired Man." Silas, a single man, an ordinary and not particularly outstanding man has come back ill and ready to die to a farm home where he has worked as hired help before. Warren, the decent owner of the farm, is not happy that Silas has come back; Silas has let him down in the past. He relents only so far as to admit that. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,they have to take you in." But Mary his wife goes further, and she says of home-. "I should have called it something you somehow haven't to deserve."

Mary is right. If we have to earn our home, our true home, what chance have we?

What can we say of our true home? You must speak for yourself. There will be clues in the home you've had; but also in the home you've never had. Let me say this:

There will be privacy there as well as togetherness; and work--satisfying tasks for which we have had some chance to become competent--and there will be leisure, and we shall learn to play again. And, yes, there will be the special others--whose very names become more hallowed with the years; I cannot conceive it otherwise. But not only they are there.

For there will be other homes in our true home--homes linked to homes, and many kinds of homes, not just those created by a man and a woman and their children. And there will be gatherings, and celebrations. And we shall learn to worship.

It will be familiar, and renewing, and ever new. It is not just "gemutlichkeit," not just friendliness and warmth and welcome--because love without justice is not fully love; but justice without love is not even justice.

So there will be a welcome there without having to earn it: and forgiveness.

And so I dream of our true home, even as I remember, remember death, and what Matthew Arnold calls "the eternal note of sadness."

Some of you have worried about becoming sad during this sermon, and some of you have fought it. Indeed, there are at least two dangers in matters like these: sentimentality is one ... a little religious emotion, a little nostalgia, a little pie in the sky bye and bye, and then back to business as usual. But the second danger in the face of sadness is refusal of it with a quiet coldness-- in fact, a certain kind of nihilism, if a very conventional nihilism. We will not allow the sadness to enter because dreams of home and justice and love threaten our "management" of our lives; and so we turn cold; we stare intently as into a black hole, and seek to steel ourselves, and feel nothing except the cold, indeed to feel nothing ... except nothing.

To those of us in this second danger--and it can be any and all of us-- to you I say, for God's sake allow the sadness, even the eternal note of sadness in! It is a way back, perhaps the only way back.

So you find the notion of our true home an impossible dream, and talk of heaven impossible to follow or to feel, all right! But let the sadness which is linked in this world to our dreams and hopes for home, let that sadness be.

Homecoming is a symbol. Home is a symbol. Heaven is a symbol.
'Just symbols?" someone asks
Of course not just symbols!

Like all true symbols, homecoming and home participate in that which is too deep for words, in that "which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived" in that which has been "revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God."

Will you hope with me that prayers, like my father's very secular, but very tender prayer--"show me the way to go home"--that my Dad who at 8 years old watched his mother die, and lost his childhood home there at the foot of her bed, that he and all like him will, verily, be shown the way to go home-- to a true and real home?

Will you hope with me--and translate hope into action, those of you who think the sermon has been escapist--will you hope and work for prisoners, some kind of prisoners, and perhaps even real criminals and would-be-criminals, that they may find, and not merely six feet under, the green, green grass of home?

Will you hope, will you work and hope, pray and work and hope that there may be a place for us, for all of us somewhere a place for us, for (dare I say it, in the face of their awful suffering?) for the starving in Africa and the countless homeless of our great cities, and the burnt out, including the burnt out right here ...? Will you take on commitment to the hope that peace and quiet and open air, wait for us, somewhere? can you let your life turn around so that your life shows your dream of that home where there begins to be time together with time to spare, time to learn, time to care? Will you dare hope together that we will find a new way of living, that we will find a way of forgiving?

There may be no way without tears; increasingly I think so, but I don't know. Save us from sentimentality, O God! But save us no less from a shallow positive thinking! And save us from the coldness which denies the symbols, the words, the dreams in which sadness and joy, sadness and hope, sadness and courage, sadness and love are inseparable! Save us from that coldness which we prefer in order that all our problems can remain "manageable"! How can we manage" heartache and death and joy, and our human longing for a real homecoming, a real home?

Well, listen to something a guy I know has written:

"The gospel shouts the good news that God is making his home with us, that we are homeless wanderers no more. We are not yet home, but we are going home. Going home to that homecoming banquet where elder brother and prodigal son, father and son, mother and daughter, exile and stranger, man and woman, white and black, East and West, Arab and Jew, poor and rich, lion and lamb will sit down together in peace. The biblical word of new creation, of resurrection, suggests that all our history--personal and communal, over all the aeons, over all the earth and throughout the entire cosmos--is not lost or forgotten. Rather, all is gathered up, restored, offered, celebrated, shared, brought into communion.

As in the...Creed, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Yes, I look and keep on looking, and sometimes I think I glimpse it from afar. And if someone tells me that "eternity is in an hour" and that homeland heaven is available right now on homeland earth, I will nod and celebrate and enjoy. But I will still wonder about the mystery which is to come--the mystery in which we shall all be changed, the mystery of that communion of the saints streaming in the gates of home when no one will be on the outside, ever again."

So let's turn to our neighbors and offer them the "peace of God."
And may we hear our neighbor's greeting to us as a call to live as those who know life to be on the way home;
to live in anticipation of our great homecoming;
to live revealing the hope that one day no one will be on the outside ever again.

“The peace of God be with you.”

Coleman B. Brown

2007-11-27T07:08:00.000-05:00

THE TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE?

Another strong critique of America's existential situation from Chris Hedges. I'm curious as to whether most folks agree with him or no? Are we winding down as did the Romans, Ottomans, British, and Russians? I guess the signs of political, economic and even cultural mediocrity are there and decline occurs slowly, imperceptibly. The question is what kind of world are we leaving our children and grandchildren?

Yet today, strangely, I am more hopeful, in spite of this lousy weather. "There's still time to change the road we're on."

2007-11-26T13:42:00.000-05:00

PROPHETIC FRAGMENTS

Here is a good summary of the three central traditions-- social gospel, Niebuhrian realism, and liberationist-- of social ethics in the United States in the last century by Gary Dorrien.

Niebuhr is making a well deserved comeback today. James Cone reveals his influence along with MLK Jr. and Malcolm X in a powerful interview on the cross and the lynching tree with Bill Moyers which airs Friday night on PBS. Virulent racism indeed is resurgent.

I would add Catholic social ethics (e.g. Thomas Merton), Jewish ethics (Abraham Heschel), socially engaged Buddhism (Thich Nhat Hanh) and post-modern criticism as important prophetic fragments.

The key is to appropriate an ethic to fight in the world for justice from our little corner of the universe. I guess this reveals that at bottom I am a Christian existentialist. "If not me, then who? If not now, when?" How we are actually connected to Christ and practicing social ethics in community matters more than our disembodied abstractions. Having knowledge cannot be equated with doing good, though truth and goodness are somehow connected.

"Gather up the fragments that none will be lost."

2007-11-25T17:22:00.001-05:00

ON WISDOM

She walks with him as a stranger
and at first she puts him to the test;
Fear and dread she brings upon him
And tries him with her discipline;
With her precepts she puts him to the proof,
Until his heart is fully with her.
Then she comes back to bring him happiness
And reveals her secrets to him.

Sirach

2007-11-21T18:28:00.000-05:00

GRATITUDE OPENS US TO NEW DEPTHS

May the spring of eternal life well up in us all this Thanksgiving season. And may we drink of its waters of forgiveness and joy with gratitude.

"What do I pray for in the Church of the future? Confidence; courage; an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity; thankfulness. The Church will do both its prophetic and its pastoral work effectively only if it is concerned first with gratitude and joy... we do not solve our deepest problems just by better discipline but by better discipleship, a fuller entry into the intimate joy of Jesus's life.

When we have become more honest about our hunger and our loss, we shall have a fuller awareness of what that joy is; and as that joy matures, we shall have a fuller sense of the depth of our need."

Rowan Williams

2007-11-20T08:10:00.001-05:00

SOME DEEP ECOLOGICAL QUESTIONS

1. Where is the divine kairos breaking into this season of life--in self, community, nation, earth-- in spite of demonic resistance? Pluralism means there is multi-perspectival experience of this reality.

2. If all that is, is good, then Christ’s life, death, and resurrection can be understood as the dynamic center of freedom which reconciles being. Revelation is permanent revolution in space and time of this deliver-ing freedom from appeasement, hostility and dis-trust of God through life as we are really living it.

3. On the whole, are the self and community reconfigur-ing in trusting or dis-trusting relation to this gracious movement of freedom? Are human gifts, power, charisma, authority, resources constellat-ing to colonize or cherish being and the "whole groaning of creation?"

2007-11-18T20:14:00.000-05:00

POEM OF THE WEEK

'Tis so much joy! 'Tis so much joy!
If I should fail, what poverty!
And yet, as poor as I,
Have ventured all upon a throw!
Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so--
This side the Victory!

Life is but Life! And Death, but Death!
Bliss is, but Bliss, and Breathe but Breathe!
And if indeed I fail,
At least, to know the worst, is sweet!
Defeat means nothing but Defeat,
No drearier, can befall!

And if I gain! Oh Gun at Sea!
Oh Bells, that in the Steeples be!
At first, repeat it slow!
For Heaven is a different thing,
Conjectured, and waked sudden in--
And might extinguish me!

Emily Dickinson

2007-11-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

STOP THE VIOLENCE

PRAY for the young people in our cities where violence is on the increase: God help us to weave a tapestry of love and not hate in our youth, a spirit of tolerance and caring, a dedication to freedom for all and not just some. God help us to sow seeds of peace and justice in our children's hearts today.
Marian Wright Edelman

There will be a rally for peace this Sunday afternoon:
ElIZABETH UNITED YOUTH COUNCIL WILL HOLD A UNITY FOR PEACE MARCH AND RALLY
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18, 2007 5PM MEET AT 200 FULTON STREET ELIZABETH, NEW JERSEY
STOP THE KILLING, STOP THE VIOLENCE, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

2007-11-14T07:30:00.000-05:00

ECOLOGY AND RELIGION: THE MENDING OF CREATION

For those interested, the Forum on Religion and Ecology is an inter-faith project (and website) which explores religious worldviews, texts, and ethics on ecology. The sheer amount of data is daunting. But then learning is a life work. They affirm, "religions need to be in dialogue with other disciplines (e.g. science, ethics, economics, education, public policy, gender) in seeking comprehensive solutions to both global and local environmental problems."

Another more pragmatic resource on ecology, ethics, and spirtuality is GreenFaith interfaith partners in action for the earth. There are some excellent folks involved in this organization in New Jersey.

I think participation in the mending of creation is part of the kairos in our chronos (divine movement in our historical moment) in spite of the forces of negation. Such moral agency is personal, pluralistic, pragmatic, global, and deeply spiritual. At its best it engenders a whole new way of being and discourse in relation to the groaning of creation.

"Theology is worrying about what God worries about when God gets up in the morning: the mending of creation." Krister Stendall

2007-11-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

MARS ASCENDING?

According to my friend Chris Hedges, war with Iran in the near future is more likely than we realize. The forces of mars and thanatos are on the march and it may ironically be only our military leaders-- Robert Gates, George Casey, and William Fallon--who are able to resist the final push. Here is his analysis. He writes:

"The last, best hope for averting a war with Iran lies with the United States military. The Democratic Congress, cowed by the Israel lobby and terrified of appearing weak on defense before the presidential elections, will do nothing to halt an attack. The media, especially the electronic press, is working overtime to whip up fear of a nuclear Iran and tar Tehran with abetting attacks against American troops in Iraq. The American public is complacent, unsure of what to believe, knocked off balance by fear and passive. We will be saved or doomed by our generals.

Hedges concludes: "We live now at the mercy of events. A provocation by Iran, aided by a bellicose White House, could plunge us into another war. It could unleash the primitive chant for violence and revenge that rises up from a population that feels vulnerable, uncertain and afraid. There are forces in our society ready and willing to fan the blood lust for a wider circle of war and mayhem."

As Reformed Christians we know about the fallenness of human nature. If this is true should we be so fatalistic about, "the mercy of events?" What beyond prayer is our responsibility as Americans? As Christians? I think we should educate ourselves on the subject through study of scripture and tradition, social analysis, dialogue and experience. But at the end of the day one must, as Dr. King said, break out of "the paralysis of analysis." If a war with Iran with modern weaponry begins and "unintended consequences" ensue, it will be a radical evil. By naming and unmasking it now, we may be able to avert it by the skin of our teeth.

2007-11-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

ULTIMATE CONCERN AND BIRD-LIME OF DEATH

El reino de los cielos es como un tesoro escondido en un campo. Cuando un hombre lo descubrió, lo volvió a esconder, y lleno de alegría fue y vendió todo lo que tenía y compró ese campo. NVI

Ufalme wa mbinguni unafanana na hazina iliyofichwa shambani ambayo mtu mmoja aliigundua akaificha tena. Kisha katika furaha yake, akaenda akauza vyote alivyokuwa navyo, akanu nua lile shamba. SNT

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. KJV

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. NRSV

Many translations, but one reality.

Yet what happens if one discovers that treasure, and hides it; then goes and... just can't quite let go of all that one has to buy that field? What then? I guess most of us know about that. Certainly the proof of the pudding (our ultimate concern) is in the eating (our living). Augustine describes it thus,

"I panted for honors, for money, for marriage, and You were laughing at me. I found bitterness and difficulty in following these desires, and Your graciousness to me was shown in the way You would not allow me to find anything sweet which was not You. Look into my heart, Lord; for it was You who willed me to remember all this and to confess it to You. Let my soul cleave to You now that You have freed it from that fast-holding bird-lime of death. How unhappy it was then! And You pricked its wound on the quick, that, it might leave everything else, and turn to You who art above all things, and without whom all things would be nothing, so that it might turn to You and be cured."

2007-11-10T17:59:00.000-05:00

HE IS THE WAY.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love him in the World of the Flesh:
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

W.H. Auden, from For The Time Being