Tikkun readers will see a photograph in the latest Tikkun Magazine on page 59 of a man in saffron colors wielding a sword at a huge rally of the Hindu right-wing chauvinist party in India. That man is Mr. Narendra Modi, who has been at the helm of affairs in the western Indian state of Gujarat, and where a number of highly respected human rights observers documented a pogrom against Muslims in 2002 that resulted in the murder of about 2000 people and the public rape of numerous women.

I reproduce below a letter that is calling for as many signatures as possible from those of us deeply concerned about the ways that such individuals as Mr. Modi routinely seek and get legitimized through awards handed out by well-known institutions (who may not be aware of their background or worse, may not consider such crimes as significant). This letter is to Ms. Marjorie Scardino, CEO of the Pearson Group, which owns the Financial Times group, which owns FDI magazine. As some of you may know from media coverage, FDI just anointed Narendra Modi “Asian Personality of the Year 2009.” Please join us by signing the letter below. The louder the reaction to this, the more chance this outrageous action will be sanctioned.

… then anything is possible.  A good day to remember that even the most seemingly intractable disputes are transitory. People change. Nations change.

Back in 1996, I never really intended to speak out as a gay Christian; certainly not at a San Jose Presbytery meeting, the legislative gathering of Presbyterian churches in our area. But there was going to be a debate, the very first of many, about whether Gays and Lesbians could be ordained, an action that my own church, First Presbyterian Palo Alto, had already boldly done in electing me as first a Deacon and then an Elder. The Presbytery couldn’t find any openly gay folks to testify. So I was asked.

As we remember the eighth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, we join our voices with the psalmist in a cry of lament: “How long, O Lord, until Abel’s blood stops crying, until justice rolls down like waters, until the lion can lay down with the lamb in a restored creation?” We lament the violence suffered by 9/11 victims and their families. And we lament the violence that people in Afghanistan and Iraq have suffered these past eight years. We cry out against the violence, and we want to act now for peace.

A couple of decades ago our brother Ron Sider made the following statement:

Making peace is as costly as waging war. Unless we are prepared to pay the cost of peacemaking, we have no right to claim the label or preach the message.

Before long the Christian Peacemaker Teams was born. CPT has been interrupting injustice and respectfully partnering with local nonviolent movements in some of the toughest corners on the planet for years. CPTers radiate the sort of courage and imagination we need if we are to expect folks to take our cross seriously in a world riddled with terror and smart bombs. For this reason, many of us have joined delegations like the one we went to Iraq with in March of 2003.

This sort of Christian “witness” is marked by the truth at the center of the Christian message–greater love has no one than those who are willing to lay down their lives for others. There is something worth dying for, but nothing worth killing for. No doubt, CPT is a new face of global missions in a world of omnipresent war – a witness to the God that loves evildoers so much he died for them, for us. These days, the cross presents a beautiful alternative to the sword.

Two of my columns last week generated a lot of commentary.

My article on the United Church of Canada’s (UCC) general council meeting, during which several resolutions with respect to divestment in Israel were defeated, generated 18 comments, which must be close to a record at TD — certainly, it is the most talked about article I have written.

My theology article, which will be a regular Friday feature from now on, generated six comments — and the single longest reply I have ever written, a reply that is an article by itself.

I am interested that my UCC piece did not generate religious commentary. I did not write the article as a religious perspective but even so…

I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred. I ground my spirit in its rhythms (as the title of Starhawk‘s recent book The Earth Path proclaims). We are creatures of Mother Earth. She sustains us. And being in touch with Her cycles gives me significant insights into my life.

Thomas Friedman’s recent eco-safari in Africa seems to have brought this home to him. Of course, as a journalist, he sees it all from the perspective of a newspaper. In fact, you could sum up his piece as “Extra, extra, read all about it in the animal and insect tracks on the earth.” But I found his insight significant, nonetheless. Friedman’s guide, Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — could read the tracks of passing animals as well as detecting the weather from their marks. More importantly, Ives pointed out all the interconnections and “free services” that nature provides.

Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,” Ives said, “then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space.”

I’ve been reading a fascinating book, Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Wright is the author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal, both of which have received great acclaim. I was led to The Evolution of God through an interview in Salon, which led me to the book’s website. The website serves as a wonderful teaser: Wright has the opening thousand words to each of the book’s twenty chapters, which are divided into four sections, one on the birth and growth of gods, and one on each of the Abrahamic religions. Be warned: by the time I finished the third, I knew I was going to buy the book. He’s a funny and literate writer, which makes his challenging ideas easier to wrestle with. As the New York Times said of the book, “There is something here to annoy almost everyone.”

The book traces the evolution of our ideas about God, from hunter-gather society to the present day. Wright’s central thesis is twofold: that religion evolves in response to what he calls “the facts on the ground”, the political situations in which believers find themselves. For example, Wright assigns the change in the Jewish conception of God from tribal to universal (from monolatry to monotheism) to the period of the Babylonian exile, as a way to cope with their defeat. In general he shows (65 pages of endnotes: I won’t even begin to go into his reasons) how all three Abrahamic religions have changed towards a generally more moral orientation through history. This sounds as though it’s another Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris screed on why religion is a fake, and it’s precisely the reasons why “The Evolution of God” isn’t that that make it so valuable a book.

Netroots Nation has posted a video of my panel, Organizing as a Healing Process: A Fresh Look at PTSD. (And you can see it at the end of this post, ed.)

Panelists discussed PTSD as a soul wound, an altered spiritual state that enables the sufferer to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances such as war, and severe personal or historical trauma. We related troop PTSD to the symptoms suffered by refugees and the survivors of disaster or genocide. People experiencing soul wounding have witnessed the naked face of humanity stripped of the divine. They are messengers, encouraging awareness of injustice and all that is wrong with our ordering of our world. Organizing heals the wounds of the sufferer, empowering her to tell her personal story, and allowing the rest of us to listen.

Troops return home from war in a heightened state of alert which kept them alive in Afghanistan or Iraq, but which hinders their readaptation to civilian life. Many bring with them an awareness of the brutal truth of our engagements overseas, an understanding their relatives and communities are not open to sharing. There are few rituals to reincorporate them into our communities. They are expected to return to their daily lives as if nothing has happened. Many are unemployed upon their return.

Whole communities can experience a spiritual state similar to our returning troops. New Orleans, Native American reservations, and children of holocaust survivors come to mind. Many communities have experienced the wholesale destruction of their culture and interdependent relationships. It is the loss of relationship that leads to the dislocation associated with troop PTSD or historical trauma, and the marginalization of sufferers that causes despair. Relationships create meaning in our lives. Organizing heals spiritual wounds by building relationships and ending marginalization.

It is important for us as a society to reincorporate individuals who have experienced soul wounds. Often, they are bearers of a message. They can tell us about the deep imbalances in our current social structure that lead to hurt, injustice and social decay. We ignore them at our own peril.

The most important elements of organizing as a tool for healing are telling and sharing of personal stories, physical movement (such as walking), and activities that involve tactile and olfactory experience (such as cooking, building and group art). Movement helps us to incorporate a somatic understanding. Familiar smells, and playing with gooey stuff such as bread dough, adobe, or paint, removes some of the horror of the experience, rendering it less threatening to tell and hear. It also provides a common experience that the speaker and listener can share.

Panelists included Ilona Meagher, author of Moving a Nation to Care: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and America’s Returning Troops; Denise Ford, LISW, a social worker who treats PTSD and board member of ePluribus Media; Richard Smith, of Vet’s Voice and RocktheBoat.com; and me, of Rio Arriba County and, most recently, of Tikkun Daily. (No point in linking. You’re already there.) Adam Lambert (clammyc at Daily Kos), moderated.

Shavuah Tov!

Nancy wrote a very pertinent comment to my post of yesterday and my response got so long I am writing it here. She talked about the way that second wave feminists (those of the baby boomer generation)  institutionalized advances in ways that first wave feminists (19th and early 20th century) could not do. Of the first wave, she wrote:

They just didn’t get around to creating structures that would last past their time, and as a result, we lost their wisdom and had to invent it all over again.

I think there’s something more there to be brought out than the creation of new structures. It’s something about how it was that the second wave changed their own lives to such an extent that they could and did dedicate themselves to building such structures.

Huan Rights Tribute next to Cit Hall

I spoke at the Capital Pride human rights vigil three days ago. I spoke from the podium at the vigil in front of Ottawa’s human rights monument. I mostly listened at the public education session the preceded the vigil.

The biblical proscription of homosexuality (“You shall not sleep with a man as you do with a woman. This is an abomination.”Leviticus 18:22) was mentioned in the public education session. We do our best as certified liberals to ignore this proscription. We regard it with frank distaste and pass it off as a primitive law that’s outdated.What we don’t do is ask a simple question — is it physically possible to lie with a man as you do with a woman?

No.

So what is he Torah proscribing? The answer will be apparent if you think on it; it’s also appalling and definitely worthy of being called an “abomination”.

Every week a collaborative group of bloggers posts a D’Var Torah at streetprophets. This week, Daily Kos diarist, ramara has posted D’var Torah: Ki Tetzei, Elul, and Ted Kennedy, a lovely diary about repentance.

If you would like to post a D’var Torah for the series, please contact ramara at rmaraport /at/ yahoo /dot/ com.

Ted Kennedy’s unfortunate passing before the Senate vote on health care reform is reminiscent of God’s prohibition against Moses’ crossing into the Promised Land.

The Lion of the Senate is no longer with us. We must ford the Jordan River on our own.

It is clear there will be no bi-partisan compromise. Neither will there be health care reform unless we are prepared to knock thousands of doors, make thousands of calls, reach out to thousands of friends. Organizing is personal. We build relationships as we forge social structure.

We are fighting a new battle with new strategies: TV-based noise and fear-mongering versus electronic community-building. It won’t be enough to sign petitions and tweet. Internet tools are a helpful way to strengthen and form relationships and to coordinate on-the-ground activity. We will have to reach out to our family and neighbors with common sense, one individual at a time. Ultimately it is you and I who will quell our elders’ fears about death panels.

While we are at it, we should pick a few blue dogs to primary, a few Republicans to knock out of the ring. In my opinion, there is no one more deserving of a primary than Baucus. No Republican is more vulnerable than Grassley.

For years, Baucus and Grassley have been the Batman and Robin of the for-profit health care industry. Baucus has secretly killed one bill after another in the dark musty corners of Senate Finance before emerging, startled, in the harsh dawn of internet coverage. Grassley faces a likely primary in Iowa from the right wing of the Republican Party. We should pray and hope for and even encourage such a primary because an ultra right wing Republican will not win that state.

We must not compromise again in the hopes of appearing to win. We must demand that our elected officials produce meaningful healthcare reform.

Tommy Douglas was a United Church minister, a Canadian icon, and the prime mover behind Canada’s universal health care system. He famously said “The trouble with socialists is that they let their bleeding hearts go to their bloody heads“. The United Church, alas, is awash in blood.

The United Church of Canada (UCC) is Canada’s largest Protestant denomination. It has been a major force in the transmisson of the Social Gospel in Canada.

Multiculturalism and universal medicare are perhaps the two most significant differences between the Canadian and American experiencs. The UCC had a committed core of religious activists that fought for both, and both are icons of Canadian identity.

Classical liberalism is the common trunk from which grows the various branches of our politics. It is the idea of liberty understood in both its positive and negative renderings. It is the freedom to act and the freedom from being unjustly acted upon. Liberalism is the effort to find the balance, the harmony between liberty and justice where justice is understood as equity. It thus gives us both libertarian suspicion of government on the one end and a socialist understanding of the necessity of government to secure equality on the other end.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy was an unabashed liberal working with a will for social justice. He believed that government could and should work to secure “the blessings of liberty” for all its citizens. It is his uncompromising, unwavering commitment to the weak and the least and the ordinary working man and woman that we will remember and that we honor.

Classical liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment. Political theorists including John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that human beings existed as free individuals in a state of nature. While Hobbes believed that the natural state was one of a war of all against all and Rousseau thought humanity was fundamentally good but corrupted by a corrupt society, the ideas of both led them to a social contract theory of politics and ethics.

Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004, from a blog in Kiev

I was talking with Peter Gabel, radical law professor and Tikkun’s Associate Editor, this week about the contrast between the word and the experience, the talk and the walk. I was saying the word is hugely important in social change, but in the end comes to little on its own. Preaching love isn’t powerful on its own. Doing love is. I cited one of my favorite set of practices for learning how to do love: Nonviolent Communications classes (NVC).

Peter surprised me by countering that, much as he appreciated NVC, in his understanding that was not the kind of experience that created social change. What does are those experiences that take us out of ourselves and our self-reflective awareness, into a communal feeling, where we connect with each other in a kind of flow. The power of the black churches in galvanizing people to engage in nonviolent conflict together and gain their civil rights was a power that flowed from singing together in church, from call and response in church: it was more kinesthetic and celebratory than self-analytical. When people were afraid they gained power from each other, from their faith nurtured in those experiences of community. This was the power he experienced in the sixties counterculture: the music, dance, celebration, crowds demonstrating together and feeling the flow of possibility, the sensuality and sexuality, the connection. He feels it today in Rabbi Michael Lerner’s congregation, Beyt Tikkun, when everyone dances together, holding hands, connected, or when they gather together under the night sky where the rabbi leads them in an imaginative experience of the universe and the planet. NVC is too self-reflective to have that kind of power, he said. (None of this is verbatim–he would express it better).

I get his point. Certainly he’s right that radical social change has often depended on these kinds of experiences. Every time rising hopes of change sweep through a suffering and angry people and they become able to topple dictators that power is in operation: the individuals who take part in these movements do undergo huge personal change in the moment, become able to do things they could never do before, but it’s more of a group phenomenon than an individual one. They catch fire from each other.

I’ve been wondering when Tikkun Daily would start talking about global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortages, etc. I’ve been worrying that maybe I’M supposed to bring up the topic, since I’m the ecofeminist blogger. I’ve even been thinking that all our talk here about other issues is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic. And now I know why I haven’t written about the emergency we face.

Today I read “Humanity at the Crossroads” by Graeme Taylor in Tikkun and freaked out. I knew all the facts he collected in his essay, but reading it altogether in one place really got to me. I meditated. And my meditation was interrupted over and over again by fears, fears, and more fears. It IS an emergency we face. We have to change things fast. And that’s pretty darn scary.

But what I realized when I finally took my walk — noticing how summer is sliding into fall, how some leaves are turning brown around the edges — was that “Where there’s fear, there is power/Passion is the healer/Desire cracks open the gate/When you’re ready it will take you through.” Starhawk, probably the best-known practioner of Wicca, wrote this chant many years ago, and it has guided my life through many turbulent times. Usually I need the help of this song when I’m having personal difficulties, but it seems to apply to this much more political situation as well.

Reb Arie as Hasidic Rebbe

Being a traditional Jew, my day begins at sunset, so today began yetserday evening when I spoke at the human rights vigil organised by Capital Pride. I was dressed like the Hasidic rebbe I am, sharing a podium with the Austrian ambassador and my local MPP, Yasir Naqvi.

Where else in the world will a Catholic, a Hasidic rabbi, and a Muslim speak to a community of GLBT activists? I suppose it might be possible in Washinton, DC — but first I’d have to take up residence there, because I’m reasonably certain I’m the only Hasidic rebbe in North America who can be considered a straight ally.

Being a traditional Jew the daytime begins about 6am, sometime earlier. When I am not overcome by fatigue — this is becoming less and less routine, Barukh Hashem (thank G!d) — I almost always now make it to the morning minyan (prayer service). A Conservative synagogue is about a one minute walk away; a modern Orthodox congregation is about 15 minutes north of me, while a fervently Orthodox school, the Kollel of Ottawa, is about 15 minutes west.

I wasn’t fatigued when I awoke this morning. I didn’t make it to the minyan.

From Gary Oliver at golliver@sbcglobal.net

I was raised in a religious milieu in which it was thought that ‘personal change’ was the primary way to create a world without war, hunger, and class conflict. “You will never cure war in the world,” I was taught, “until you cure war in the home.” Leaders who had unresolved issues of ego, arrogance, resentment, desire for praise and so on in their personal lives, who could not get on with their own families and colleagues, could not create peace or unselfish social reform.

So we had no idea what to do with leaders like Martin Luther King, who was a sexual philanderer, or the Kennedy brothers. From today’s New York Times:

Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr. Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years.

My name is Lauren Reichelt and I am more than honored to be your new health care blogger.

I am the health and human services director of a rural northern New Mexico county. We consist of 41,200 residents (the population of a New York high-rise) spread over the combined land mass of Massachusetts and Rhode Island (5,858 square miles). Nearly three-quarters of our residents are pre-Mexican-American War Hispanic, 14% are Native American, and 13% are Anglo.

Our “population center” (9,000 people) is nestled in a valley at 6,000 feet, surrounded by 10,000-12,000 ft peaks. It takes three and a half hours to drive from one end of my county to the other. Emergency medical transport often means throwing a seriously injured person in the back of a car and then driving like a bat out of hell through a mountain pass to meet the ambulance. Ten years ago, when I conducted our county’s first needs assessment, I learned that women in some of our remote villages were still birthing their babies at home without the support of even a local midwife (a situation which I believe we have since corrected).

This week’s spiritual wisdom was written by Harold W. Becker, president and founder of The Love Foundation, Inc:

(Photo courtesy of FlickrCC/Photos8.com)

From the laughter of children at play to the golden rays of the sun beaming through the sky at sunset, the eternal song of love permeates all creation. Each beat of our heart pulses to this rhythm in a majestic and graceful dance connecting us to everyone and everything. Life is magnificent when we quiet our outer selves and become fully present and aware of our own loving essence.

To know this grander love is to go beyond the sensation of a first kiss or a mother’s tender touch in time of need. Although these extraordinary expressions reveal the existence of love, there is so much more. This universal love is unconditional and its very presence ignites our passion and our compassion. It breathes life into our being and sustains us. It encourages and illuminates the infinite possibilities while simultaneously providing all that we require to be alive.