Hiding the Flag?

For the first time ever, I wondered if any of my neighbors would look askance at the thirteen star flag I hang every Fourth of July.  

This flag, for me, as well as any version of the American flag (I have 48 and 50 star versions), stands for the ideals of the American Republic—to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for “all.” 

But this year, Nike famously withdrew its 13 star flag shoes because Colin Kaepernick said the first flag of the Republic flew over, and therefore “represented,” a slave-owning nation. I am not ignorant of the ways in which American understandings of what “all men” means were shamefully limited at the beginning. But more generous understandings, with laws to bolster them, have advanced since then precisely because of those founding words. 

Is the Betsy Ross flag now to be linked with Confederate general statues erected specifically to celebrate the triumph of Jim Crow in the South? What about the 48 star flag that flew over the Jim Crow South, or the 50 star flag that flies today over a nation still struggling to fulfill its promise—a promise that has grown in meaning and scope over our nation’s nearly 250 years?  

Growing Understandings

I know that “all men are created equal” didn’t really apply to black slaves kidnapped from Africa in 1776, (or to women!) but I also know that there were many people, even then, that saw the contradiction. I’ve learned that John Quincy Adams used the phrase in the successful argument before the Supreme Court that freed the Amistad slave ship captives. The phrase has inspired the aspirations of African-Americans for generations, who have demanded, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that America live up to its promise. The flag is a symbol of that promise, not just a begrimed reminder of our national faults and failures. 

That is why I am disturbed by all too many “progressive” people who seem to be ceding the American flag to the Right, which is happy to claim it for its meaner vision of the “real” America. Why should they be allowed to co-opt this national symbol? 

And yet, I’ve had more than one progressive friend, though the ages, look askance as they come up my front walk, if I have a flag hanging on the porch, as I do on national holidays: the 13  star for July 4, the 48 for D-Day and Flag Day, the 50 for Memorial Day, Labor Day and Veteran’s Day. More than one has said that “they don’t like the current associations,” or that they don’t believe in such displays of “patriotism,” as if love of one’s country and its ideals belongs to the Right.

The Way Forward: Affirmation not Denial

The way forward in this national struggle is not to cede patriotism to one political slice of the population, but to affirm its original and continuing power to signify the best of the nation’s founding values, however flawed our realization of them may be in any era. 

In the run up to the national disaster of the 2016 presidential election, our most right-wing neighbor heard a group of us lamenting the increasing popularity of Donald Trump. “It’s clear,” she said, “who the people that love America are on the street—we fly the flag.”  One of my fellow progressive neighbors muttered that he wouldn’t fly the flag because it now “stands for people like her.”  

I challenged him: “How can you let people like her claim the flag for themselves?” A discussion ensued, and the next day a tiny, hand-held American flag appeared, stuck in a flower pot, on his porch—the only flag he had. (A larger one was to follow).  Since then, I’ve heard more than one anti-Rightist citizen talk about “that Constitution of ours” as a barrier to progress, rather than the launching pad of revised understandings and social progress through the years. I grow uneasy.

As the 20th century historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it; invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.” We will not realize a more generous America by denigrating our Founding Story, but by building on it. 

If Progressives cannot, or will not, root their vision of “America” in the “creed of equality” proclaimed by our Founders, flawed as they were; if they do not seek to “mend its flaws” by appeals to their daring promise, I fear we will not prevail in the struggle against those who would shrink that vision to some smaller, meaner version.

Jesus, the   Resurrection, 

and Earth’s Hope

All God’s promises 

receive their Yes

and Amen in Christ.  

St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:20

Just a few weeks ago, a woman in my class shared “the newest dystopian sentiment going around” — that humanity is doomed to extinction, but “this will be good for the planet.”  Actually, I’ve been hearing this for some time from relatives (“the animals would be better off without us”) and friends (“the earth will survive, but we may not, and that may be a good thing!”).  One common tag line to this imagined scenario is, “Serves us right.”

I suspect embattled whales and threatened elephants might heartily agree. After all, what many environmental scientists see as the “Sixth Great Planetary Death” of species is well advanced, largely due to the impact of humans, the currently over-successful species. But I can’t join in the “better off without us” sentiment: I am a captive to hope, in large part because of the biblical Story of God’s “humanity project”—God’s promises to humanity, and through us to earth itself.

The narrative you choose to live in matters. People of biblical faith have a Story available to them which says that the Creative Love that birthed the world cares about its fate, and ours as a part of it. This can give people of faith courage and hope that fly in the face of dystopian discouragement. The more you think we’re doomed, the less fire in the belly you’ll have to work toward a better outcome for earth and all its creatures.

Almost a century ago, the French Jesuit Pierre Thielhad de Chardin anticipated our current moment in Building the Earth: 

“The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth . . . It is too easy to find an excuse for inaction by pleading the decadence of civilization, or even the imminent end of the world. This defeatism, whether it be innate or acquired, or a mere affectation, seems to me the besetting temptation of our time.”  

A Reappraisal of the Biblical Narrative

Every new era sees a different dimension of Scripture. One of the great reappraisals of Scripture in our time highlight s how important the earth itself is in the overarching Narrative. What begins in a Garden ends with the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem to a purified and revitalized earth. In this scenario, the resurrection of Jesus is the first act in a redemptive drama that culminates in the resurrection, transfiguration, and restoration of earth itself. The resurrection of Christ isn’t simply an assurance the faithful will have eternal life, but the first step toward the “restoration of all things.” (Acts 3:19-21).  All God’s promises find a rousing Yes! in the crucified, risen Christ, including the continuation of “seedtime and harvest” (Genesis 8:22).

The first humans were given a set of Primate Mandates as earth’s guardian species: to “keep/watch/preserve and cultivate/serve/reverence the earth,” (Genesis 2:15), to relate with respect to the other species, and to create communities in alignment both with the created order and with the will of heaven. Human injustice and evil was seen in biblical culture (as in most ancient cultures) as throwing creation itself out of whack. In the Story, Christ is the Second Adam, born to initiate a process of setting things right in soul, society and human activity. When the Apostles proclaim the Resurrection, they link it to the ultimate renewal and transfiguration of the planet, not just to the narrower hope of persons living forever beyond death. 

Such interpretations are not mine alone, but part of a reappraisal of the Biblical story along a wide continuum, from Chardin to Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si on the environment.

One is not obliged to take all this eschatological imagery literally to take it seriously as an affirmation of humanity’s vital link to the well-being of the planet. The way the Story captures my heart, imagination and dedication means that, in spite of the looming threats to humanity, I cannot choose to write off humanity as a major evolutionary blunder. This would be a sin against biblical hope. The Story calls us to preserve and serve Creation as God’s gift to all species, not humanity’s exclusive larder.

What is Salvation For?

Souls need to be saved, yes; but for what? The Prime Mandates in the Creation story anticipate to an amazing, and alarming, degree the way in which we have become such a pivotal primate species on the planet, lording it over everything else in delusional and destructive ways. Our souls, our human psyches, need to be redeemed from their slavery to self-serving ends—saved for loving and serving Creator and creation not just ourselves. The Scriptures assure us that if we fulfill the mandates of our humanity, our eternal destiny will take care of itself,

Those who rejected and crucified the Prophet, and more than a prophet, Jesus represent the universal human tendency to rebel against the Good, to undermine our own long-term well-being, to hide our eyes from the “things that make for peace” (Luke 19:42). From the Cross, Jesus tells us that “we know not what we do.”  We didn’t mean to set off the current Great Death, but our heedless assault on nature provoked this die-off.

Choosing Hope

The times are genuinely apocalyptic on many fronts: destructive climate change, the bristling threat of nuclear devastation, the fragmentation of the post-war international order, the rise of terrorist assault on civilization. But we can change; we can repent; we can save the life of many species still remaining, including our own. This is what the God of the biblical Narrative hopes, desires and believes about us: “you can change. Choose life, not death.”  The Scriptures, and the ancient Jewish midrashic stories that surround it, picture the Creator gambling that this species will end up bringing earth and all its life to a new level of flourishing. 

“Earth would be better off without us,” however understandable such a sentiment might be, is a counsel of despair—unless it is a dawning realization that change must happen. We have been so bedazzled by the Myth of Progress that when “progress” falters, or its aims turn out to he flawed, secular faith in humanity falters easily. The the Scriptural Saga says that God believes in the Humanity Project.   

Our progress toward the Good is often touch and go, but we can and must learn from our mistakes. We live in an era where massive realization, repentance and amendment of life, personally and socially, is mandatory. 

Maybe you think the story the Humanity Project and oJesus’ resurrection are a fantastic fable. Then call it a dream, a motivating mythos planted in many human hearts over the time of the biblical narrative’s development and carried on in the heart of Christianity, sometimes hidden in the shadows. But the earth-oriented reappraisal of the Story can help Christians join the growing multitudes of people who realize that the human species has, quite literally, been born out of the earth-process itself, and morally owes its mother better treatment—to say nothing of our own survival.  

Whatever your animating Story, if you work to help turn this all-too-destructive, profit-at-any-cost marketplace civilization away from the brink, you’ll be part of the Resurrection Brigade.

America on the Fourth: Rival Visions

“All men are created equal” seems central to the American Dream. America not only possesses a huge land-mass, but is possessed by aspirations, dreams, beliefs in a land of opportunity and fairness, "with liberty and justice for all." Yet "who is all" has been a work in progress.

Only White Persons May Apply?

In 1922, the Supreme Court rejected the application of a Japanese resident, Takao Osawa, to become a citizen because he was “not of the Caucasian race.” A year later, the same Court rejected an Indian immigrant,  Bhagat Singh Thind, who pleaded that he, as a Caucasian, deserved citizenship. Abandoning their reliance on the pseudo-scientific “races of Man” scheme, the same justices ruled that the “common understanding of race among ordinary white citizens" excluded such dark-skinned people. (1)

Only “free and white” persons could become citizens the 1906 Naturalization Act had declared—the legal outcome of a century of widespread belief that the U.S. was meant to be the home of the racially superior “Anglo-Saxon Civilization.” Rooted in ethno-centric prejudice, a "science of race" developed that confirmed it. When Hitler's Aryan superiority myth led to horrifying results, that prevailing American white supremacist belief retreated to fester in marginal groups.

The African-American writer Ta-Nahisis Coates asserts that the “American Dream," is maintained by an “obligatory historical amnesia” — a cultural habit of forgetting the ugly parts of our past (2). But no ugly past stays silent in the past, returning in forms both old and new. America is currently faced with a resurgent, and somewhat disguised, version of that old exclusionary vision. 

America: A Creedal Nation

The United States is a visionary country, a creedal nation—the first creedal nation in the world’s history, inaugurated by a Declaration and Constitution embodying its tenets. The American Creed sets forth a humanistic vision of a community commited to certain “inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Over time, the application of those rights has extended beyond the original northern European population to all other European immigrants, women, African Americans, and, finally, to the likes of Takao Osawa and Bhagat Singh Thind. 

Our history involves the same process of “new light breaking forth” from the words of our founding Creed as do the evolving interpretations of religious scriptures. As the Old Testament scholar Margaret Barks observed, religions consist of symbols, rituals, creeds and customs the meaning of which “the followers disagree about repeatedly.” The primal DNA of the American Creed, "all are equal," has eluded all our attempts to bind it into narrow ethnic or racial boxes. 

The past: veto of the future or foundation for it?

Our current, fractional Presidential campaign embodies these creedal disagreements amply. Competing visions of America clash, partly obscured by a level of personal venom and invective seldom seen since the 19th century. Lurking behind the crippling stalemate of Republican and Democratic establishments, overlapping visions of involvement in a multinational world and marketplace thrives. Outside those establishments the regressive vision of America for “us, free of foreign contamination and entanglement" rises again, the very spirit of the Courts 1922-23 decisions. 

Neither political establishment, Right or Left, has adequately addressed the dislocations thrust upon America by that changing world culture and a global marketplace, leading to the discontent fanned by the resurgent Regressives. We are in an in-between moment, searching for the next embodiment of the American Vision—a moment rife with new ways people are excluded from equal access to the "pursuit of happiness." The vision we choose for our future will have lasting consequences. Creeds can lock us into to our past or can also inspire us to live into the further implications of their values. 

This fourth of July is not a time to gloat in how "great" we are or were, but to ponder how great we may yet become if we take our creedal DNA seriously.  

____

1.  See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind   and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozawa_v._United_States

2.  See Ta-Nahisi Coates Between the World and Me—a piercing account of the Black experience in America. 

Talking to Opponents—Actually Talking!

Ah, political “con-versation” in America today:

My neighbor’s late night email howled: “How am I supposed to answer this pile of misinformation and lies?”

Miles, a Democrat, somewhat further Left than I, had gotten an article from his conservative Republican relative Bart about reasons to support Donald Trump. Miles had already fired off a fiery repost, reacting to assertions that Obama was “deliberately engineering decline of the military,” fomenting a “war on cops” and “flouting the will of the people,” to mention but a few.

So Miles had fired back: “You people have a twisted view of the world, and if you want to live in constant fear of ‘the other,’ be my guest . . .I can't understand how any reasonable human would allow this egotistical, manipulative, bully, con artist to get anywhere near the White House.”

Miles’s repost had the inevitable result: a still more incendiary email from Bart’s conservative Christian brother about Miles’s “godlessness," with a sharp turn into transgender bathroom issues—what passes for "debate" in contemporary America..

Incendiary Rhetoric

Thus raged the current polarized non-conversation between disagreeing Americans, each side hurling potshots at each other: fire and smoke, verbal grenades and harsh words—anything other than what once passed as debate and dialogue. 

Let me be clear: I agreed with Miles that the original article had some real misinformation (even disinformation) in it, and much distorted rhetoric. But underneath all that right-wing bramble were real feelings and some genuine concerns. Miles’s “answer” had been full of Liberal invective, not an engagement with the underlying issues. His email bristled with phrases like “You people” and the clear accusation that Trump supporters are simply “unreasonable.” 

Is there no alternative to this family-diving, friendship threatening barrage of words? Miles and I spent the next two days debating how to engage the debate in more constructive ways, like this:

Better Rules of the Road

1.  Start with agreements, if possible. If not, at least with recognition of the other’s concerns. “I can agree that frustration with our deadlocked national Establishment has generated much of power of the Trump campaign.” 

2.  Ask for further clarification: What makes you think this way? What led you to these conclusions? What reasons do you have for accepting these positions? 

3.  Then, and only then, question what you consider misrepresentations, exaggerations, disinformation or outright untruths. If possible, share concern over the issue at dispute. I can’t agree that Obama is trashing the Constitution with Executive Orders because other Presidents like Bush, Lincoln, and Jackson have set many precedents for such decrees. But I do agree that this area of Presidential power is very undefined and controversial. 

4.  State the way you see the situation, and why you see it that way. From my standpoint, Trump has made a number of extreme statements that imply a more serious disregard for the Constitution than any previous President or candidate—and give specific examples. 

5.  Avoid the comforting exhilaration of declaring the opposition ignorant, stupid, or immoral. Recognize that real people have real concerns, however poorly, in your opinion, they are expressed, or even how much factual error surrounds them. 

Communicating rather than winning

The above suggestions are not intended to “settle” arguments, but to encourage communication. This isn't just about being "nice" (though nice is usually better than nasty). Such rules of engagement open the possibility, difficult as may be, for challenging, communicating, and questioning. 

At this perilous point in our history, both Liberals and Conservatives (to use inadequate and clumsy labels) largely feel the other side is ignorant, misinformed, or immoral—or all three. This leads to the luxury of retreating into our own tribalistic echo chamber and congratulating our moral superiority and superior intelligence to each other. Our self-selected media outlets reinforce this. Moral superiority over the benighted other rules the day, in all directions. 

There are better ways to live. Better ways to have a political conversation. Better ways to be America.

And someone might actual be provoked to rethink something they believe. 

Brutal Toughness Arises

Donald Trump says he will abolish gun-free zones around schools and elsewhere his first day in office. He's not the only Tough Guy on the prowl:

The president elect of the Philippines promises to “fill Manila Bay with bodies” in a crackdown on crime. Gunmen patrol the perimeters of mosques in the South. Putin plays the strong man in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel. Hillary Clinton, the first woman to find herself within hailing distance of the U.S. Presidency finds herself attacked from the Right by a verbally brutal man and on the Left by an increasingly belligerent one.  And that’s not to mention the thousands of young men raised in the West who desert to fight against the liberal, Enlightenment democracies they grew up in. Primitive warrior belligerence seem to be on the rise.

"What Rough Beast?" 

Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung was alarmed, in 1930, to hear, from every one of his German analysands dreams about the ancient Teutonic berserker warriors.  On this basis he published an essay, Wotan, which chillingly predicts the triumph of the brutal Nazi regime. The berserker didn't appear to me in anybody's dreams, but in some films of the late 70s and early 80s—films like the uber-macho Rambo series and even in the masterfully crafted Lord Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984). As Sylvester Stallone emerges bloodied but alive after one of the Rambo series frequent blood-baths, I felt the same archetypal chill.  To quote Yeats' "Second Coming" (1919): What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

I seem to have an inner sense (I jokingly call this "Cassandra" after the Trojan princess who accurately spotted trouble ahead). My Cassandra has a disturbing ability to notice dark clouds arising on far away horizons, and watching these films chillingly reminded me of Jung's observations. In the outer world, the "voodoo economics" of Reagan were taking over, and the GOP's dog-whistle racism was in full swing. The country was moving away from the New Deal's "we're in this all together" spirit and headed toward the "every man for himself" mentality we see today on the Right.

My chills do not a prediction make. Donald Trump does not bring Hitler to mind for me, but he is the latest in a long, intensifying line of men (and a few women like Sarah Palin) for whom belligerence is a value, civility, reason and facts the signs of the “loser.” And he joins the rising company of those strong men who praise “shooting from the hip, “usually phrased as “telling it like it is,” which really means “putting some words to the frustrations I feel." Meanwhile, the Enlightenment dream of the free exchange of ideas in civil discourse is threatened on the Left by an often rigid “politically correct” moralism. Allergic to any disagreements, it reacts with moral outrage rather than "say more about why you think that."

Can the Center hold?

The long-term consequences of all this are uncertain, but the effects so far amount to a major assault on the foundational principles of Enlightenment civilization: our sense of a common humanity over against ethnic prejudice; what the 18th century public thinkers called sentiment, or fellow-feeling that opposes brutality and hard-heartedness; the values of tolerance and civility vs. trash-talk and gleeful prejudice; and reasoned debate based on facts and evidence as a more productive way to truth than passionate belief.

Such values form the moderating "center" which fostered the pluralistic, democratic Western world we inhabit—and even significantly disarmed the population. But now it seems as if The Center cannot hold/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity. (1)

What can anyone do?  Hold the Center!  Refuse to give in to the current polarization. Try to understand where others are coming from, even as you disagree with them. Avoid the dangerous luxury of moral outrage so enjoyed by the "righteous" on Left and Right. This country is in the midst of an extended struggle at a crossroads of its history.  These are bulwark against a rising belligerence that may well lead to the blood-dimmed tide Yeats feared in 1919.  Is that what we see already in the smaller incidents, both Left and Right?

My inner Cassandra is worried. 

_____________

1. W.B.Yeats, The Second Coming.  See http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

At the heart of reality, life-out-of-death.

The Paschal Mystery is at the heart of Christianity because it is at the heart of the world’s life. What happens on Calvary is many things, including the vivid glimpse of how Things work. 

At the heart of life death dwells, but life springs from that dark heart. The very elements making up our bodies,  the cosmos as a whole, were forged in dying stars,  the first to flare forth. Dying yields life. The very ground under our feet, the fruit of myriad deaths becomes the grist for greenly springing new life that yields, in turn, life which soon becomes earth.

So is it strange that Jesus dying, as he does upon the rough wood of the cross, was seen, by some, as an ikon, an image, a glimpse of a cosmic "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”? What is revealed on Calvary is the timeless reality of the Crucified God—a God crucified and rising again to continue loving and blessing, creating and re-creating. 

What do I mean?  Quite simply, that God is present at the heart of this dying-into-new life process, not remote, not watching it from a distance, but in it, with us, beside us, around us. God is Emmanuel, God-with-us, before, during and after the earthly life of Christ. We don’t talk this way, but the saga of the Scriptures is the saga of the crucifixion of God, of how God’s loving purposes, again and again, are frustrated by human sin.  Both in parables like the story of the first Parents in Eden and the Tower of Babel and in the saga of Israel’s history interpreted by the faith of the writers,

human beings violate the fabric of God’s goodness in each other, in society, in creation itself.

Cain kills Abel, the brothers sell Joseph into slavery, the children of Israel resist their own freedom,

David murders his captain Uriah to cover up his adultery, the ancient Kingdom of Israel wanders away from God’s path, God’s plan to bless the very ones who keep themselves from the blessing.

This is our story, the story of civilization, ours and every other. There is much good, of course, much human courage and creativity and kindness, but again and again the human race tears at the fabric of God’s goodness, God’s very presence in the world, in creation itself. God is here, God is wounded in us. God is wounded for us.

As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem God’s Grandeur.

     Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

        And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;

        And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

     Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

     And for all this, nature is never spent;

        There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

And for all this, God’s grace is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things—God’s constant love which has long since determined not to abandon us, whatever we do. Even on the Cross, God remains Emmanuel. Christ, as the Messenger of God, accepts the reality of all human sin dumped upon him, yet keeps on coming among us, determined to help our better angels defeat our worst. Christ on Calvary represents all human suffering, and presents it to God. He represents God’s participation in it all: the homeless, the diseased, the victims.

But he also represents the God who continues to invite us all into his loving embrace. His resurrection declares that new life can come out of suffering and death.  The dearest freshness deep down things flows forth in “Father forgive them.” And on Easter he will stand among us saying “Peace be with you.”

From the death of the first generation of stars and the rebirth of the cosmos to the death of Christ and his reappearance in transfigured form, God is life-out-of-death.  Which is why this day was, of old, “God’s Friday” and is now called “Good Friday.”  Both are true, more than we can ever know. 

Civilizational Divides and Church Disciplines

Inevitable; it was always almost inevitable.

It took a decade and more in coming—the vote by a majority of Anglican Primates to “discipline” (not “suspend”) the U.S. Episcopal Church (TEC) for blessing same-sex unions and “changing” the meaning of marriage. (1)

I stand firmly and joyfully in support of the Episcopal Church’s decisions, but we need to recognize, soberly, that these dynamics far transcend religion itself.

The cracks in the Anglican Communion’s foundations simply reflect growing the civilizational divide between the post-Christian West and much of the rest of the world. While the legalization of same-sex marriage has grown apace in countries like in the British Isles, the Scandinavian countries, France, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Canada, Brazil and the United States (to mention but a few), countries more deeply tied to conservative sexual sensibilities have dug in their heels in reaction: Nigeria, Uganda, India, with Russia trying to become leader of a moral coalition against alleged Western “decadence.”

The more progress, the more resistance

The more the West asserts its changed moral convictions, the stronger the opposition becomes. For Westerners accustomed to leading the “advance of civilizations” this is a rude awakening. As the conservative African bishops remind us constantly, the colonial era is over. Like it or not, the West is now only one part of a competitive collection of civilizational blocks outlined in Huntington’s prescient The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

A world-wide fellowship of Churches like the Anglican Communion cannot escape the consequences of such divergent civilizational developments. That ecclesiastic and political leaders (like Putin, for example) would play on this divergence for various secondary gains was also inevitable, humanity being what it is. A good deal of capital can be made out of a sense of moral superiority, resistance to the influence of former colonial powers, or promoting a sometimes simplistic version of “our” moral past.  

Both sides are deeply part of their own cultural context. The different focus of their polarized moral arousal cannot be separated from this fact.

One of the early advocates of LGBT full inclusion, retired Bishop John Spong, saw this inevitability in a New York Times op-ed piece as long ago as 1998. The Primates' very carefully worded (aka 'Anglican') statement, may well the last attempt to re-form the Communion as a ‘loose fellowship of churches' that actually continues to stay in some relationship—a family—however impaired. 

Moral arousal or moral outrage?

So, each side feels morally superior, and believes they are right. As the U.S. Primate Michael Curry states clearly, the TEC feels this is a matter of fidelity to Gospel values, as the Spirit leads the church into deeper realizations of truth. In the past two decades TEC has declined to abide by the declarations of the last two Lambeth Conferences about marriage, for human rights reasons seen as spiritually compelling.

Meanwhile, moral arousal does not have to become moral outrage, however tempting that is or how enjoyable it feels. I know where I stand, and why. You probably do, too. But Jesus warned us about the dangers of arousal becoming outrage. (3) We know that outrage increases a dangerously blinding, either/or, us/them view of reality that can be destructive. 

Arousal can, on the other hand, lead to grace and steadfastness in the face of opposition—and holding firm to the practice of seeing opponents as real human beings with real concerns, however divergent.

_____

1.  See the actual text of the Primates Statement at http://www.primates2016.org/articles/2016/01/14/statement-primates-2016/

2. See Thomas Friedman, "The Age of Protest" at
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/opinion/the-age-of-protest.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthomas-l-friedman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

3.  "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you." (Matthew 5:44). Love here, of course is agape, an intention for their ultimate well-being, not fond feelings. See previous blog on the Paris attacks on this website. 

After Paris: Love Your Enemy—Really?

Jesus and Buddha: Your Enemy is your Teacher?

In the wake of terrorist attacks like that in Paris last Friday, what sense does Jesus’ famous (or infamous) charge to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you” make? The customary Christian treatment of this has been, at best, to say to Jesus “thank you for sharing” and return to business as usual. 

Hating the enemy is, after all, natural and normal. But, of course, hate breeds hate, which may be what Jesus was getting at. And, anyway, when he said “Love” he didn’t mean warm, fuzzy feelings. He meant something very close to what the Buddha meant by calling humanity to have a clear intention for the other’s well-being, plus a call to compassion for everyone you meet, That links with Jesus's repeating the Jewish maxim “Love your neighbor as yourself. Consider the other to be as human as you are."

Even then, Jesus: do you mean we should intend well-being for terrorists who shot innocents by the dozens at the concert hall in Paris, who blew themselves up and killed others at restaurants? Who killed themselves to kill others? Compassion? Give us a break!

Your enemy is your best teacher

The Dalai Lama, who knows the Buddha far better than I do, insists that “your enemy is your best teacher.” He ought to know, I guess, since the Chinese government has been hounding him ever since he decided they wouldn’t be good for his beloved homeland. 

Such a saying gives me a radical new slant on the meaning of  “love your enemy.” What if the problem with our ever-so-natural horror and hatred of the enemy is that it blinds us? Blinds us.

If we are angry—and hatred is distilled anger—our brain tends to block out any new information. If we are dealing with an enemy the last thing we need is blindness. We need to see, not just what we hate, but the actual human being who is behaving in ways that harm us (or that we fear will harm us). When we say, “How could anyone kill a concert-hall full of innocent people?” we need to hear it as question directed to us by ourselves—or perhaps the Spirit in us. A question that needs an answer. 

Seeing the enemy more clearly

“How could anyone act that way?” we say, not realizing we're inviting ourselves to find out, to get to know the enemy better, to see the opponent in the fullness of their humanity. What is the anger? the alienation? ignorance?—or the reaction to injury?—that leads to terrorist outrages?  Even if we want to strike back, we’ll act with more wisdom if we can see. And if we decide that simply striking back is insufficient, maybe risks jumping from the frying pan into the fire, seeing the enemy more clearly may lead us to more nuanced, varied, and effective responses. We will be clearer, also, on how to distinguish terrorism from Islam itself. 

Not humanity’s usual tactic.  But the Dalai Lama goes on. In response to a human rights activist who says anger is her driving force,  I heard him say, "BE angry! Anger is good! Anger is natural! But don't stay there."

The enemy can “teach” us by provoking deeper understanding. Understanding the sources of the enemy’s anger better,  compassion may arise, however wrongheaded we may think the enemy to be. We might even learn what injuries, real or imagined, provoke the enemy—unless we have some delusion that "we" are perfect, flawless, and innocent.  

Maybe that’s why Jesus tells us to take some time to contemplate the enemy in prayer, to imagine blessing their fundamental, frail and fallible humanity, to ponder how to do such good as will lead to long-term solutions. Even if that involves restraining evil by force to begin, which is never a good place to end. 

It’s Privilege at Stake, Not "Religious Freedom”

People who have been dealt all the high cards for centuries react badly when they get dealt low cards. If they then begin howling that their “freedom” is being taken away, they’re referring to their power to control the game. It’s all about the loss of cultural and legal privilege.

That’s the drama being played out in Morehead, Kentucky, as the religious right uses County Clerk Kim Davis’ conservative Christian beliefs to claim an exemption for “religious liberty” with cries of “persecution” abounding. 

Historic Protestant Hegemony

America’s foundational freedom to practice religion without State interference is not at stake here. As we become more religiously diverse, the power of Christianity, especially one brand of the faith,  to dominate culture and legal systems inevitably wanes. White Protestants of northern European extraction ruled the roost from colonial days until the mid-20th century. Their morality and values were reflected in the law, especially with regard to sexual morality: contraception, orientation, divorce. 

Protestant privilege held sway with great power, with the approval of the majority. Religious minorities had little or no power to exercise their “religious liberty” except in private life and worship: Jewish businesses that closed on the Sabbath had to shut down on Sunday as well. Homosexual acts were against the law. Atheists had no cultural “liberty” to achieve elective office even if there was “no test of religion” in the law. 

Peak and Decline

This Protestant hegemony peaked in the post-War 1950s and talk of our “Christian” nation’s battle with “Atheistic Communism.” Then, in rapid succession, a Catholic was elected President, public school prayer was forbidden, Sunday blue laws unravelled, and abortion was declared legal. Disadvantaged minorities (Jewish business owners, non-believers, and women) gained more freedom of choice. 

The power of Christian privilege to shape culture and law was diminished significantly. But the constitutional guarantee of freedom to practice one’s religion was not touched—just the historic freedom to impose it on society at large. For many millions, especially those who took Christian privilege for granted, the nation-wide legalization of gay marriage seems the final straw.

No Easy Settlement?

As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wisely observed, differing values really cannot be reconciled perfectly. While it seems abundantly clear that a representative of the State must obey the laws of the State or seek other employment, other clashes between the right to marriage for gays and other situations is probably not as black and white an issue as either side wants to acknowledge. 

The Founders, overwhelmingly, believed that a strong and diverse religious culture, free of government interference, would be a vitally important element in the Republic they were establishing, and supported religions of all kinds (at first mostly Protestant) by special exemptions. Settling this in specific cases will not be easy in the current brouhaha, and the far Right has opened a new battle in the culture war which it has waged ever since the school desegregation undermined the once-powerful white Protestant belief in the separation of the races. 

But the cry of “liberty lost” boils down to the loss of privilege, and shouts of “persecution” to outraged, politically ominous pouts.

The Dangers of Righteousness

Righteousness, especially when it turns indignant, can cause as much harm as the evil it opposes. Just think of Prohibition, that bonanza to bootleggers, and midwife of an empowered Mafia. 

Perhaps this is why St. Paul was so suspicious of it. His own righteous zeal had led him into the persecution and even outright lynching of the early Christians he later joined in a dramatic about-face. He insisted that contrasting your good points with your opponents bad points breeds blindness. Humility is the beginning of greater clear-sightedness. 

I was reminded of the the perils of righteousness this morning when I read about an Israeli documentary (photo above) rejected by a Norwegian film festival simply because it was by an Israeli filmmaker. The documentary, about disabled children, ran afoul of a “righteousness aura” growing up around the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Even the Palestinian founder of the B.D.S. movement says that “mere affiliation of Israeli cultural workers to an Israeli cultural institution is therefore not grounds for applying the boycott.”  (1) 

Beware the Polarizing Brain

When righteousness gets up a head of steam, however, such fine distinctions cease to matter, because inflamed righteousness rejoices in simplistic thinking and polarizing stereotypes. Undocumented Mexicans are Trumpeted as “rapists, murderers and thieves,” a government-regulated health care plan is “socialist,” and anyone who opposes gay marriage is an ignorant fool. Inflamed righteousness is an equal opportunity virus, attacking liberals and conservatives of a particular stripe equally. (2)

Such righteousness actually holds us back from its more mature cousin, love of the Good. “Righteousness” so easily becomes about me, and puts me against all those who, because they seem devoted to some other good (or god) are unrighteous (or ignorant, wicked, lesser). Worse yet, I am so easily blinded to the ways I myself am ignorant, or wicked, or participate in policies that foster oppression or destruction. 

So, St. Paul challenges his Greek listeners to come off the high perch of their righteous sense of their own “wisdom” — their intellectual and cultural superiority — which leads them to label all other cultures, including the Jewish, “barbarian,” lesser, just not “enlightened.” And he challenges his Jewish listeners to let go of their stance of superior moral conduct and denigration of outsiders as morally inferior. Greeks can be stupid and Jews immoral, so get over it. “All have sinned and fallen short” (Romans 3:23).

Humility before human complexity and contradiction 

This is not, as is so often assumed, a wholesale condemnation of human nature, but a call to realistic humility in the face of our own complexity and the equally mixed nature of those we may disagree with. When we do that, we have a greater chance of wrestling with complex issues of good and evil with less heat, self-righteousness, blame and blindness.

True love of the Good means growing skill in discerning the good—as in seeing the good in a documentary about helping disabled kids by an Israeli “tainted” only by being an Israeli and therefore inevitably complicit as a citizen in his country’s mistakes and sins. Or seeing the good in one's opponent—unlike the good Norwegian film festival organizers, who are surely exempt from any sins and mistakes in their own country’s growing crisis over Muslim immigrants, touted by conservatives there as a “crime and rape crisis.” (3)

Sounds all too familiar.

Notes

1. See http://nyti.ms/1gVkSos

2. For a full treatment of this phenomenon see Jonathan Haidt The Righteous Mind, available at righteousmind.com

3. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigration-and-national-identity-norway

Can you read the morning newspaper without weeping?

Is it nothing to all you who pass by? Behold and SEE.

—Lamentations 1:12

Can you read the morning newspaper without weeping? Try. I dare you—just try. 

Should you read the morning newspaper without weeping? I begin to think weeping may be a duty, an obligation at this moment in our history. At least for anybody who dares the pray to any God imagined to care about people, to care about the earth.  “Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus says, which I’ve always taken to mean “Blessed are those who actually see that there and things in the world to be grieved.” 

Today's news

Today, July 31, 2015, I wept reading “DuBoses: Grieving But Determined” by Charles Blow on the NYTimes Op-Ed page. Blow was “embedded” with the grieving family of Sam DuBose, the man killed by a University of Cincinnati police office on July 19 in one of those all-too-common “driving while black” pullovers that have contributed to the extra-high hypertension rates in the African American community for decades. He speaks of their grief and calm stalwartness in bearing witness to the tragic injustice of the encounter that led to Sam’s death. (See link below)

Maybe my tear-ducts had been softened up by the stabbing of six people yesterday at Jerusalem’s Gay Pride March. One could feel grief over the plight of the thousands upon thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing violence and climate-change induced droughts in places like Syria and Africa. But I know men and women who have been stopped multiple times for driving while black, so the Cincinnati incident hits closer home. 

Still, I got close to tears, and didn’t avoid a twinge of grief as I listed to an interview with a Syrian man and his wife, five months pregnant, who were crouching in a wooded area near the “Chunnel” tracks that take trains from France to England, trying to hop a train under cover of darkness. “Isn’t it dangerous,” the NPR reporter asked. “Not as dangerous as Aleppo is today,” the man replied. 

Because of this temptation to grieve, perhaps to weep, some of my friends say “I just don’t look at the news.” Or perhaps they take in a limited dose, laced with snarky Jon Stewart humor, that sugar-coats the bitterness, or at least softens grief into rueful laughter. OK. Fine. Keeping up our spirits is the American way, isn’t it? 

Why grieve? 

Call me crazy, but I feel compelled to “behold and see” these injustices. I’m not so sure—the Declaration of Independence to the contrary notwithstanding—that a God-given right to happiness was in my spiritual birth-packet.  I think God is more concerned about my learning how to care, to have compassion, and to act on those feelings whenever possible, even if all I can do is bear witness and pray. I have happiness in my life, sometimes in abundance, but it is no longer the measure of my “success” as a human being. 

Jesus says we those mourn will be “comforted,” a correct but misleading translation. The word in Greek is stronger, and related to encouragement, even to advocacy: paraklēthēsontai is one form of paraklete, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, the one of “cries in us,” encourages us, strengthens us.  

Even outrage is weak if we avoid the strong growth in fellow-feeling that grief can give. If we always avoid the grief, will the fire in the belly required for participation in real change ever be ignited? 

___

For Charles Blow's Op-Ed piece see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/opinion/charles-blow-the-dubose-family-grieving-but-determined.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

Up the Skirt Photos a Free Speech Right?

"The center cannot hold; things fall apart."    —W. B. Yeats
(1) 

You probably missed it, but Washington D.C. Superior Court Judge Juliet McKenna recently declared innocent a man arrested for surreptitiously taking photos up women’s skirts of their private parts. Why? The photos were an exercise of “free speech." Besides that, woman do not have a “right to privacy” in public places if they are so foolish as to let someone do this. (2)

Do you ever get the impression that the definition of  “free speech” may be going too far—and all at the same time an ominous counter-trend in the law eats away at other protections to our freedom?

On the one hand, we’ve gained all kinds of ground for what sociologist Robert Bellah called “individualistic expressionism.” (3) On the other hand, laws that allow the government to confiscate personal property merely upon suspicion of a crime, for example, continue to grow apace. And this is to say nothing about the egregious ways in which the rights of minorities are violated daily in the justice system. (I sometimes have a momentary paranoid flash that increasing personal freedom may be a “bread and circuses” ploy to satisfy the population while the National Security State encroaches more and more). 

While legally a different issue, the reinterpretation of the Second Amendment away from its original social meaning (the need for militias) to a purely individualistic meaning (my absolute right to carry a weapon) is part of the same trend. 

An eroding societal ‘center’?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy to live in a country with a right to express freely my social, political, and religious ideas. But stealth photos of women’s crotches as free speech—give me a break! Better yet, give the judiciary some greater sense of the idea that every right carries with it responsibilities. I was taught, in Seminary, that any virtue carried to the extreme becomes a vice, and that even free speech was limited by a cultural sense of social responsibility.

But that stabilizing center of social sensibility, personal self-restraint and responsibility progessively erodes in our midst, more and more issues end up in court rather than settled by cultural norms and standards.

Where is the balance?

Early 20th Century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the constitutional prohibition of legislation against free speech was not ”intended to give immunity for every possible use of language.” He was the product of a culture which considered free speech to be tempered by self-regulation for the common good.  Contemporary legal theorists like Nigel Warburton consider such ideas “outmoded.” (4)

"Free speech” has expanded to cover flag burning, most pornography, heckling near women going for an abortion, hurling anti-gay slurs at the military funerals and outside church services, and (still a mind-boggle to me) corporate and personal rights to give enormous amounts once forbidden to political campaigns. Liberals and conservatives alike applaud the freedoms they like and deplore those they don’t.

If rights have no limits, one set of rights clashes severely with another set of rights. All issues of freedom are, for Americans, very touchy. But so is the guy using stealth to peek up your skirt, which new technology makes easy to do secretly and stealthily.

How can we find a new stabilizing center? Or will our growing freedoms become the anarchy the Security State will find a tempting target for future expansion?
____
1. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming.  See http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

2. See Jessica Goldstein,  "In the Light of the Upskirt Ruling, Some Fashion Tips for Ladies" http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/10/10/3578895/in-light-of-the-upskirt-ruling-some-fashion-tips-for-ladies/

3. See Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

4. See Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction by Nigel Warburton. http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/03/book-review-freedom-and-its-excesses.html

Francis: In Touch with Earth’s Soul

Jesus said: ‘Pick up a stone, and I am there; 
split the wood—I am there also.’ (1)

St. Francis wasn’t the only one with a special connection to animals. From time immemorial some people have been able to live “deeper in” nature than others.

Francis once commanded a noisy flock of birds in a tree to be still while he preached, and they not only obeyed to but stayed for the whole sermon, leaving immediately when it was over. Something in the energy of his very presence drew animals to him. St. Seraphim of Russia who befriended a bear. St. Cuthbert of Britain's limbs were said to have been warmed by sensible seals after he had stood ascetically in a tidal basin for too long.

Fables? Talk to the young forest ranger who once described to me how he moved through the forest so that the creatures wouldn’t hide from his presence. “People barge in like they own the place, he said. You have to walk softly, silently. Then they come out of hiding.” Or talk to Native American shamans and connecting with animal spirits. For that matter, you can talk to my wife, who has a remarkable way of befriending skittish animals. 

Tap-rooted into Paradise

These folk seem to have a foot in two worlds—one in the fabled Paradise of our human origins, when the First Parents communed with the soul of bird and beast, and another in our present "eclipsed" state, remote from the ancient mammalian/primate rapport with nature. The bible is not the only sacred lore that remembers such a Before Time.

Jesus seems to fit in this company. “What manner of man is this?” his disciples asked, and told stories about the effect of his presence not only on people, but on the natural world around them. He spent a sojourn in the wilderness ‘with the wild beasts’ and emerged unharmed. He stilled a violent storm on the sea of Galilee by speaking directly to it, as if to something intimate and familiar.  Jesus himself fits in this company.

Jesus seemed to live “deeper in,” in more vital contact with the soul and spirit of the world than other folks, like other holy men and women throughout history. They breathe the soul of earth as well as the Spirit of God.

The skepticism modernity brings to these stories goes hand in hand with our own soul’s disconnect with the spiritual aliveness of the world around us.  As bedazzling and beneficial as our civilized advances have been for humanity, they have come with a price—progressive distancing from direct rapport with the soul of nature, the soul of the planet itself. The Jesus described in the gospels is in touch both with his own civilization and the deep currents of power and life that flow through the soul of the world around him.

A way back into the world?
 
Perhaps, like some Zen monks, he and Francis, Seraphim of Moscow, the wise women of every earth-rooted culture, and the shamans could live with mind and body simultaneously in two states: deep, meditative connection with the depths of the ever-springing Life that pervades this world and the ordinary events of the day.

Early Christians, following the highly-disciplined Path he laid out for them, claimed that initiation into Christ “opened the gate to Paradise" and looked forward to a "restoration" of earth to its primal vigor. Maybe it's time to reclaim that ancient reading of Jesus and his Way. Is it a path back in to the world we are so ‘progressively’ destroying?

Surely there is a better path than the one our civilization is on.
_____

1.  Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77

The graphic is St. Seraphim of Sarov with his companion bear. For more on this famous Russian saint, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraphim_of_Sarov

Angels—Symbolic? Real? Both?

It’s the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, one of my favorite days. But with angels it’s either feast or famine in this culture, even in the church. 

Within religious and ‘spiritual’ circles we have everything from explaining angels away to  almost codifying their DNA. On the one hand, we hear high-toned interpretations of ‘ancient beliefs’ which boil down to symbols of Divine providence. On the other extreme, there are those kitschy new-age angel-channelers who can, for a small fee, tell us the exact name of our guardian angel and even send us a nicely colored drawing of them plus personal angelic greeting.

There’s biblical precedence for these two polarities, of course, and much in between. We have stories where the ‘angel of the Lord’ appears, only to be replaced a verse or two to later with the Lord himself. Clearly the angel is not a separate entity here, but a ‘scaled down’ manifestation of the Divine itself. (1)

We also have stories in which such a ‘scaled down’ theophany has become a real, distinct entity. From Joshua’s encounter with the ‘captain of the Lord’s armies’ to David’s  placating an angel of the plague to Tobias’ seemingly human angelic guide Gabriel, we hear of a host of invisible beings who hover about the human family on their heaven-sent missions. (2)

And, finally, there is the biblical hint that anyone and anything can become, for the moment, an angelos, a malach or messenger of God:  “who makes his angels spirits and his ministers flames of fire” and “do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for some have thereby entertained angels unaware.” (3) 

The Blank 'Above'

In our secularized culture, belief in angels has waned along with significant denial of any kind of metaphysical reality. As the Jungian analyst and author James Hillman points out, even our ceilings have become flat and white rather than richly ornamented with celestial beings. There is no ‘beyond’, and thus the angels have no home. (4)

People who take angels with any seriousness at all—whether as symbols or entities—seem to think they have to choose one of the biblical options, rather than seeing them as multifaceted reports of a reality that transcends one kind of manifestation. Similar stories appear in other cultures as the surprising appearance of the gods and goddesses.

But the angels, originally, weren’t so very ‘beyond,’ but, as the biblical scholar James Kugel points out, ‘just out of sight,” as if just on the other side of a veil, ready to appear at any moment. (5) Like the truck driver in the big rig who stopped on a stormy night to fix my niece’s flat tire, then mysteriously disappeared. She turned to get a piece of paper to write down his address so she could send him a thank you note, and he was gone. “No cab door slamming, no sound of the big truck leaving. No sight of the truck down the road. Weird.”  (6)

Maybe this visitation was of the “he makes his angels appear like truck drivers and his ministers car mechanics” sort, with an honest-to-goodness human being. Then again, perhaps it was more like the angels in the book of Judges who seem to be ordinary people but disappear in a cloud of weirdness. (6)  Maybe the weirdness was a trick of her mind.

Or maybe our species, which can only see select parts of the whole light spectrum, and keeps discovering undreamed of dimensions of the universe, has made a mistake in turning almost every ceiling blank and white.

_____

1.  Exodus 3:2-4

2.  See Joshua 5:13-15 and Tobias in the Deuterocanonical books.

3.  See Psalm 104:4/ Hebrews 1:7 and Hebrews 1:13:2

4.  See Blue Fire, the anthology of James Hillman’s thought, edited by Thomas Moore (HarperPerennial).

5.  See James Kugel, The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible (Free Press)

6. Sophie Burnham’s intelligent and informed discussion of a host of such contemporary encounters in A Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present (Tarcher) is worth the time to read.

7.  See the visitation to Gideon in Judges 6 and the annunciation to Samson’s mother in Judges 13.  While these stories are part of legends, they illustrate the kind of angel appearance lore that circulated in ancient Israel, and thus have an archetypal quality. 

Silence and Shouting: Climate March Reflections

So there we were shouting, singing, waving flags and carrying signs that read “There is no Planet B” and “Butterflies against the end of the world” as we marched 300,000 strong in Manhattan on Sunday at the People’s Climate March. But, in spite of the thrill of the March and the inspiration of the songs, the sight that struck the deepest chord in my heart was this: twenty or so people on a hill in Central park utterly still, utterly silent, holding an “Earth Vigil,” meditating, praying for creation itself and the salvation of our civilization from its destructive, errant ways.

The silent energy palpably radiating from these solemn folks spoke to me more loudly than all the wonderful, noisy energy we made to “sound an alarm” to the world leaders gathering at the U.N. this week.

A Mighty Tide of Witness

Of course, the intentional noise of the March had its own integrity and delight. There were so many participants that the organizers begging some people toward the end of the line, over two miles long, to leave the parade and walk along the parade route as spectators. Those of us in the “religious and scientific groups” section filled 58th street as we waited over an hour after our announced “join the march” before we set out—an encouraging sign that more than the expected 200,000 participants had come.

And come they did! As my small group from Summit, NJ boarded the train for New York, we met a family of five who had driven up from Virginia at the last minute to be “part of history.” Hanging ecumenically between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians as we waited, I met a young priest from Portland, Oregon and a woman from the Diocese of New Mexico whose Bishop, she said, is solidly behind increasing awareness of climate change. Church groups were there from Pennsylvania, Boston, California. The Hare Krishna folks in orange mingled with Muslims in white caftans. The “agnostics” and “spiritual seeker” groups stood in solidarity with Congregationalists and Catholics.

Among other groups of marchers, environmental activists and union members voiced their concern together with “clean energy creates new jobs," liberal and conservative, young and old alike were united in this urgent and pressing Cause.

Bearing Witness—How?

But it’s the Silent Earth Witness folks that haunt me still. Their solemn faces bore witness to the seriousness of climate change. Recent scientific data confirms that earth’s temperature continues to rise, whatever the climate change deniers may say. Some projections see serious challenges to future food supply as well as the well-publicized effects of rising oceans.

We need the boisterous marches and rallies, and more of them. Persistently.  But what if we also had silent gatherings, again and again—dozens, hundreds, thousands facing the statehouses, ringing the Capitol, in utter stillness proclaiming our deep, deep prayer for humanity, civilization and the earth?
_____

See The NYTimes coverage at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/nyregion/new-york-city-climate-change-march.html?_r=0