We’ve started a new program named “Quest” at First Unitarian Society (FUS). FUS created Quest in order to help members who want it to develop a deeper commitment to their spiritual journey. Some of the introductory writings about the program describe it as “a journey toward wholeness, holiness, and peace.” It’s a very exciting two-year “pilgrimage,” and I’m blessed to be a part of it as a mentor to two women who are participants.
Today one of my partners contacted me. I’d just finished re-reading a chapter from Parker Palmer‘s A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Lifeabout “Being Along Together,” a good metaphor for my role in this process. And yesterday I had finally bought two chairs for my meditation room, where I hope to meet with my partners –if that’s what they want. So synchonicities are lining up to indicate the “rightness” of this choice.
For several years now, I’ve been considering spiritual direction as a new option in my life, and being asked to become a Quest mentor helped strengthen this interest. Sometimes referred to as spiritual guidance or spiritual friendship, spiritual direction like mentoring takes place in a one-to-one relationship, in which a person who wants to become more attentive to their spiritual life meets regularly with a “spiritual director,” in order to awaken more fully to the presence of spirit and how it moves through their existence. I’m not using “God language” here, because not all UUs are comfortable with it. But what I realized while re-reading Parker Palmer is just how uncomfortable I am with the term “spiritual direction.”
From the Progressive Change Campaign Committee today:
You may have heard the news. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is threatening to help Republicans block a vote on health care reform if the bill includes a public health insurance option.
But when reporters asked Lieberman if he’d be willing to lose his powerful committee chairmanship as a consequence, he said: “Oh, God no.”
What’s our answer? Hell yeah!
You and 90,000 others signed our petition to Democratic senators asking them to strip leadership titles from Lieberman (or others) if they block reform. Can you help us get to 100,000?
I often say to my congregation, “We are not individually salvageable.” Salvation, in my view, is not individual but collective. The only thing that will save us, as empire systems come crumbling down, is deep, sustained relationships, not just with those like us, but across every line of difference. We are going to need each other.
I believe that we go to church (or to any other faith community) not to affirm and preserve our identities – whether black, white, gay, straight, working class, middle class, or whatever – but to be transformed, alchemized through deep full-on engagement with each other, into Holy Spirit-infused community with the power to confront the forces of empire in solidarity with each other and with those living in the margins of the city outside our doors. This process will require each of us to lay on the altar some parts of who we believe ourselves to be – parts that don’t serve the flourishing of all life. This is not multiculturalism but what I call interculturalism. Multiculturalism places cultures side by side; interculturalism involves the alchemization of cultures into something entirely new.
In order to understand why multiculturalism is so utterly insufficient as a model for Holy Spirit-infused community, we have to look at how “whiteness” functions to appropriate cultures and consolidate power. Whiteness is not a culture in itself. There were no ancestral “white people” with a “white culture”; rather, there were scores of cultures that have been assimilated into whiteness in a move toward power.
In one room, young Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, secular humanists, and others cluster in a circle to learn strategies for facilitating constructive interfaith discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Down the hall, more young people — bareheaded or wearing headscarves or kippot — crowd together to discuss multifaith intentional living communities, learn about the Baha’i faith, create videos about youth-led interfaith activism, and train to volunteer as advocates for undocumented immigrants.
Talk about a rich space for conversation.
All this happened during one morning of the Interfaith Youth Core‘s 2009 conference, which took place October 25-27 at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. The conference brought high school and college students engaged in interfaith work together with religious leaders, politicians, and authors interested in interreligious cooperation. Speakers included Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard; Tikkun Daily blogger Joshua Stanton, who founded the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue; Rami Nashashibi, the inspiring director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network; Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who has worked with Tikkun to garner support for a Global Marshall Plan; and others.
It’s that time of year again! Leaf blower time! Yuck.
I love the fall. It’s full of color and change. And usually I love my neighborhood. It’s located behind a big hill, so we don’t hear much of the street traffic from the major thoroughfare in our area. And, of course, it’s on the lake, so the vista and the quiet — even when it’s raining, like it is today — are beautiful. But there are certain times when the noise level is literally deafening, namely when people should be raking.
It’s important for those of us who live on the lakes in Madison to deal with the leaves that fall in our yards. Every leaf that goes into the lake produces fodder for the next season’s algae growth — one pound of phosphorus from any source, including leaves, results in 500 pounds of algae. In fact, this time of year you can see yard signs all over town, stating “Love your lakes — Don’t leaf them.” So I guess I should be glad that people are blowing their leaves away from the water. But it would probably be better for them as well as for me and their other neighbors, if they raked rather than using leaf blowers. They’d get some exercise, and I wouldn’t have to walk around with my fingers in my ears.
I’ve just read one of the most powerful and delightful essays I’ve every encountered. Written by Johnathan Safran Foer, author of “Everything is Illuminated”, the New York Times piece (in their food issue) is about the history of his relationship with his grandmother, with his children, with the Holocaust…. and how those relationships are mediated by the choices people make about the food they eat. It’s a must read article.
More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met – her otherwordly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation – and while I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.
The story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joy, humiliation, religion, history and, of course, love. It was as if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.
“The ineffable Name of God: We have forgotten how to pronounce it. We have almost forgotten how to spell it. We may totally forget how to recognize it.” – Abraham Joshua Heschel
For many people, “work” and “spirituality” negate and contradict each other; they are polar opposites that come from two entirely different universes.
Such individuals may be well-versed in the concept of “work”: They do it almost every day. But they do not properly understand the concept of “spirituality.” To them, “work” is wholly practical, rooted in the necessities of this world and geared toward providing for self and family. “Spirituality,” on the other hand, is otherworldly, ethereal and has little bearing on what seems to be one of the most mundane, demanding and unavoidable aspects of our lives: Our jobs and our professions.
For them, the concept of spirituality has to be reconstructed, almost from the ground up. These doubters have to reorient themselves to spirituality’s surprising practicality, to its broad applications to every facet of our lives, and to the surprising symmetry it has with work.
But this is hard for many of us to believe. That difficulty arises because of our preconceived notions about the nature of spirituality, work, and “the real world.”
As a rabbi, I have heard many misconceptions from lay people about spirituality. Below are some of the most frequently voiced opinions about spirituality – and how I respond to them.
“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” — Harold Rosenberg, art critic, who coined the term “Action Painting” in 1952 (later called Abstract Expressionism).
Standing barefoot atop a long, white strip of paper laid out on the ground, the artist holds a mop-sized paintbrush dipped in black paint. She quiets her mind, remembering everything and then letting it go, her whole life, the entirety of existence. She surrenders to the moment. She lowers brush to paper and makes her mark, a single, swift, dynamic black stroke across the length of the massive page. Finally trading the black brush for red she lashes out again, a single shriek of red amidst the vivacious black, a splatter of blood upon the earth.
10 pm October 27: In the past twenty-four hours 5,185 connections were made between Palestinians and Israelis using Facebook. Oh. You thought Facebook was just a way to show off your spring break pictures? Think again.
Earlier tonight Peace Innovation, a project out of Stanford University led by Professor BJ Fogg and the Persuasive Technology Lab, launched Peace Dot – a project to promote world peace through persuasive technology. Peace Dot is encouraging companies and organizations around the world to create subdomains within their existing websites that will be devoted to the struggle for peace. Peace Innovation lists nineteen domains that have already been created. Facebook is already leading the way with peace.facebook.com.
Facebook’s page features statistics of social networking connections between historically conflicting groups, subdivided into geographic, religious, and political categories. In addition to the connections made between Israelis and Palestinians, 7,339 connections were made between Indians and Pakistanis, 8,431 between Albanians and Serbians, and 13,790 between Greeks and Turks. Connections are also listed between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and more specifically, between Sunnis and Shiites.
Admittedly, this site isn’t necessarily promoting specific actions to foster peace yet, but for me, it was uplifting just to see real numbers of those who are reaching out to their brothers and sisters on the other side of the struggle. It can be far too easy to slip into apathy or skepticism about the goal of peace in the Middle East or the larger goal of world peace. Just look at the other graph that shows the percentage per country of people who believe world peace is an attainable goal in the next fifty years. Only 7 percent of Americans agree with this statement. But knowing that these new connections are being made every minute reminds me, and will hopefully remind the other 93 percent of Americans, that we will not always be stuck in grid-locked negotiations. With every passing moment there is a growing movement of people, young and old, who are taking matters into their own hands, and making the effort to connect on a personal level with those they might otherwise be fighting.
Congressman John Lewis with teens from an earlier Cultural Leadership class
I’ve been hearing for a couple of years from Karen Kalish about this program that takes Black and Jewish teens around the country to learn about the ways their activist forebears helped each other’s causes. Now teenager Nina Oberman has written us a beautiful piece that tells you what’s happening.
Cultural Leadership
by Nina Oberman
In 1963 in Birmingham, teenagers my age walked fearlessly as a torrent of water drove into their bodies, forcing them to the ground. They stared into the menacing eyes of police dogs, at their shredding teeth, their flailing paws, and their tongues slack and thirsty with the blindness of trained attack.
45 years later, I stood on the very same ground that they clung to in determination. A white Jewish girl, I held the hands of my black Christian friends in mutual support of our past and present struggles. The hoses and dogs are gone—but the march continues.
I was blessed to be able to travel across the country this summer with Cultural Leadership, a yearlong program that trains St. Louis teens to become activists for social justice. We examine the issues of privilege and injustice through the lens of the African American and Jewish experience, and learn the knowledge and skills needed to make positive change in our communities.
Senator Joe Lieberman announced today that he will not support a health care bill that includes a public option. According to the Wall Street Journal, Liberman said “I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It’s not. It’s going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn’t, it’s going to add terribly to our national debt.”
While I’m deeply disappointed in Joe, I’m not surprised. But I do find his rationale for wanting to block a public option somewhat pathetic. Forcing people to buy health coverage and NOT having a government-run option is what will cost taxpayers more money. We need to have competition in order to drive prices down.
Look at the “Healthy San Francisco” program, which was designed to make sure everyone in the city had some form of health coverage. They’ve been up and running for over a year now and a recent survey showed that participants were “highly satisfied and voiced a resounding endorsement of” the program. And, it costs less per person than private insurance would.
So here are the excluded poets (about whom we wrote here) holding their own off-conference event:
Speaking at Busboys and Poets in front of huge comic portraits of Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, the disinvited poets Josh Healey and Kevin Coval, together with moderator Laila Al-Arian, showed why it was J Street’s loss that they did not appear at their originally scheduled panel. The duo clearly embodied the “emergent” Jewish identities that J Street desperately hopes to capture, with poems about their families in Israel, why Kevin quit going to shul, and yes, the Holocaust.
… Josh’s mother spoke up in the Q&A to urge people not to boycott J Street, which no one has called for. But I was reminded by her words to see J Street as a work in progress, learning and feeling its way. As Josh posed the question, will it be a two-way street? Later at the opening plenary, I was impressed by the force of J Street’s numbers and resources and real desire to open up the conversation on Israel in Jewish communities. If they are at all successful in that, it will be impossible to keep voices like Josh’s and Kevin’s out.
Then later the replacement for the poets at the J Street conference praised the above event and went on to say he favored
creating a “truly J Street dialectic: pro-conference and pro-poetry (a play of words on J Street’s tag line, pro-Israel, pro-peace), which led to applause.
Many people have been saying many things about what the political relationship between different groups of American Jews and Israel is or should be, and the rest of the world (including Israel) has been reacting to what they’ve said, and that statement is probably where agreement stops. I’m going to attempt to show some of the more interesting things that are being said about J Street, as we go into the week of their big conference in Washington. This will hopefully provide some interesting background and context. The selection and the content certainly don’t represent any Tikkun point of view; heck, some of them don’t even represent mine. But if I only looked at things I agree with, how would I learn anything I didn’t already know?
There’s a fine article about Samuel Bak by Ezra Glinter on the new Zeek website (about which more at the end of this post). Bak’s extraordinary paintings have appeared a number of times in Tikkun, which is where I first became aware of them. I had not read about the artist before, and found Glinter’s article fascinating.
Bak was a child in the Vilna Ghetto under the Nazis and was saved from extermination more than once by his parents’ ingenuity and, I assume, chance (his father did not survive). His current exhibition, Icon of Loss, at the Pucker Gallery focuses on a famous photograph of a small Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto with hands raised as a Nazi points a gun at him.
“With his arms lifted in an attitude of resigned and bewildered surrender and his depleted gaze focused on my eyes, he has never stopped questioning me,” Bak writes in Between Worlds, a collection of his work from 1946 to 2001. “In the Vilna Ghetto, I was his age and I looked – as did thousands of other children destined for the same fate – exactly like him. Same cap, same outgrown coat, same short pants. I always considered this picture a kind of portrait of myself in those times.”
After the war, relocation to Israel and service in the Israeli Defense Forces, Bak studied art in France and Italy. Considering the discussion I started here about abstract art and our own Tikkun art gallery, it’s not surprising I found this fascinating:
During his time in France and Italy, Bak embraced the abstract and semi-abstract styles then in vogue, and achieved a modicum of success in Europe, Israel, and the United States. By the time he was thirty, however, he realized that the abstract style he had mastered was not sufficient to deal with the enormous weight of his experience. “My dealer was contented and the critics praised me, but I sensed that I was moving toward a dead end,” he writes. “I had a feeling that instead of unfolding my story, the abstract paintings were suppressing it.”
by: Dave Belden on October 26th, 2009 | Comments Off
A nice email here from StopTheChamber.com, relating to The Yes Men’s latest brilliant prank.
U.S. Chamber Of Commerce To Sue Itself For Fraud And Self-Parody?
Washington, DC: On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to an internet provider threatening legal action if it did not shut down the Yes Men parody website, because the website falsely portrays the Chamber’s position on global warming. However, in its letter, the Chamber falsely inflated its membership by 1,000 percent and falsely alleged copyright infringement. The Yes Men lawyers strongly opposed this take-down demand and the site remains up at www.chamber-of-commerce.us.
“It is ironic that the Chamber, one of the biggest funders of front groups that smear non-compliant public officials, is now complaining that the Yes Men are poking fun at its anti-science positions. If the Chamber’s pattern of behavior continues, it will soon be taking itself to court for fraud and self-parody,” said David Swanson of www.StopTheChamber.com, a coalition of nonprofit organizations. “The Chamber has publicly claimed that people do not cause climate change, minimum wage laws harm workers, financial deregulation creates jobs, unions are bad for workers, the Family and Medical Leave Act undermines families, healthcare bankrupts businesses, and Wall Street bailouts promote free enterprise. These preposterous claims are usually made by late night comedians but, when made by the Chamber, they fit perfectly into its pattern of fraud, deception and disinformation.”
The following emerged from our work in supporting environmental sanity, and is shared in a spirit of humility, knowing how much we all have a long distance to go to be doing all that we could and should to save the planet from the destruction to which our current economic and political system contributes, and knowing that you can probably devise an even better statement of a personal environmental commitment that more fully fits your own situation, capacities, and limitations.
Personal Environmental Commitment
[ ] I will learn more of the details of the multiple levels in which we are undermining the life support systems of the planet, from overpopulation to over consumption to dumping our garbage, to destroying the air and the water, to excessive use of the resources of the planet to … endless other ways. I will work within some community of which I am a part in order to raise the issues of environmental degradation and what we can do not only as individuals but as a community to challenge our government to take all steps necessary to reduce the carbon in the air to below 350 parts per million.
[ ] I will carefully follow the activities of my elected representatives in Congress to ensure that they do not adopt compromise measures which they justify as “politically realistic” but which do not adequately reflect the actual needs of the planet for immediate and drastic action to reverse all the ways in which we are destroying the life support systems upon which we, the animals, fish and birds depend. I will then let neighbors, friends and members of any group or community to which I have access know about the behavior of these elected officials.
[ ] I will myself take significant steps to reduce my own misuse of the environment, starting with:
Take us, human beings, as an example. We are mammals. We bear live young, little creatures that are totally dependent on others — incapable of doing the basics necessary for survival (parents know what I’m talking about). But we are also homo sapiens. That is, we are the creatures who were created to live not by instinct alone, but by sapientia, or wisdom. With the capacity to learn wisdom and with opposable thumbs, we are highly adaptable to our habitat and equipped with an extraordinary capacity to use tools and transform our habitat, as well.
What the wisdom of my Christian tradition tells us about limits boils down to this paradox: We are fundamentally creative, and yet we only flourish within limits.
What the climate change debate (and the 350 campaign in particular) is putting back on our radar is what we should have been recognizing all along: that there are limits to human existence.
1) We cannot survive exposure for extended periods of temperatures above 50o C or below 0o C.
2) We need food and water – after just 3 days without water and our system starts to shut down.
3) We are land creatures who use lungs to draw oxygen from the air. We can swim and even use tools like a snorkel or scuba to stay submerged underwater for a spell, but we are bound to live on land (not too high though, as if we were birds) and not under water (like fish).
Now here’s the kicker that sets the stage for the current conversation about climate change and limits:
by: Dave Belden on October 24th, 2009 | Comments Off
Amazing victory by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood which I was writing about here only two days ago. Disney is giving refunds on their Baby Einstein videos because, to put it simply, they didn’t work. Read all about it in the New York Times here. Some quotes:
The videos – simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words – became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.
Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.
… [The Campaign] also described studies showing that television exposure at ages 1 through 3 is associated with attention problems at age 7…
“My impression is that parents really believe these videos are good for their children, or at the very least, not really bad for them,” Ms. Rideout [of the Kaiser Family Foundation] said. “To me, the most important thing is reminding parents that getting down on the floor to play with children is the most educational thing they can do.”
A few minutes later: Right after posting this I read this email from Tikkun columnist Allen Kanner, who makes the connection much clearer than the NYT article did between “Baby Einstein” and the toy industry:
My group, CCFC, made the front page of the New York Times today with a story we’ve been working on for years. Disney has been lying about Baby Einstein DVDs being educational, a ploy that has helped to fuel a huge toy/media industry for little children based on a scam (by and large this stuff is not educational, much of it retards cognitive development). We got some lawyers to threaten to sue them.
I haven’t been blogging as much as usual the past three weeks. The week before last my daughter was here visiting, and that one-ups almost everything else in my life. These days we live almost 1,000 miles apart, so we don’t get to see each other as often as I would like.
And last week I was preparing for a Festival Choir concert that we performed Saturday and Sunday. It was a joy and a lot of work to get ready for our concert, but I guess I knew that was the case when I joined. You see the Festival Choir is one of the best choruses in Wisconsin.
And this week I collapsed, pooped, didn’t want to do a thing. But I don’t feel bad about my choices at all. My daughter always lifts my spirits, and the music the Festival choir made was heavenly. I think our conductor, Bruce Gladstone, said it best as we waited to perform for the second time. He reminded us all of our ecological footprint and how we are trying to reduce it so that we can step lightly on the earth. But he said for him, it was just as important to leave an imprint of beauty. Our choir had spent a huge amount of our time — in rehearsal and outside to learn Mozart’s “Regina Coeli,” Bejamin Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb,” two luscious pieces by Brahms, plus much more– and we had used that time to make our small part of the earth a more beautiful place. When I get down on the human race and realize just how we are degrading the planet, I have to remind myself that we are also the ones who create — great music, great art, great drama, great literature.
Without the arts, our lives would be drab. And I believe without the arts, we will be much less likely to repair and heal our world. Tikkun needs the arts. I guess I would probably be less tired if it weren’t for my choir, but I would also feel less alive.
All this happened during one morning of the 
10 pm October 27: In the past twenty-four hours 5,185 connections were made between Palestinians and Israelis using Facebook. Oh. You thought Facebook was just a way to show off your spring break pictures? Think again.
