Peace is not absence of conflict. Peace requires hidden conflicts to be brought out and engaged in nonviolently, so they don’t get repressed and eventually erupt in violence. When conflicts are repressed, injustices do not get redressed. Pain builds. People suffer in obscurity (which is not peaceful for them), unless and until they revolt.

But are we peace types studying the art of fomenting conflict? No. We are much more likely to be thinking how to avoid conflict. I can go to classes in nonviolent communication any night of the week in the Bay Area: and I recommend them, they are amazing and I don’t have enough time in the rest of my life to get good at what I have already learned at them.

But I want the next stage: classes in how to bring inherent conflicts into full vibrant nonviolent clash!

Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless. It’s a story of ignorance, invisibility, and ultimately of the ability to pass. You see, I’m a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship.

I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It was definitely in the “provinces.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising that although I’d heard of homosexuality, I had no idea until I reached college that female homosexuals existed. I’m not sure I encountered the word “lesbian” until I was in my twenties.

In 1965 as a freshman at Smith, I started to hear rumors that the woman who lived across the dorm hall from me was “different.” Nobody stated directly how she was unlike the rest of us. But according to the whispers, she was recruiting other girls as well. By the time I returned from my junior year abroad, she seemed to have succeeded in enlisting at least one other girl, and it became apparent to me that they were lovers. None of this seemed to affect me very much. In those days, I was pretty sure that I was heterosexual.

It’s unclear to me if I ever would have discovered my sexual attraction for women if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement. Lots of the women I hung out with in the late 1960s and 1970s were out lesbians. They were strong, wonderful women. Eventually I had to acknowledge that I was attracted to more than one of them on more than a platonic level.

During a meeting of the NYC Network of Spiritual Progressives group this week, the topic of discussion turned to economic reform. The original NSP “Covenant with America” dealt with this topic in a general way by promoting a new bottom line in our values system, and in a specific way by promoting the Social Responsibility Amendment for corporate behavior. The discussion at the meeting focused on our disappointment that very little has happened in terms of economic reforms as a result of this past year’s economic meltdown. In fact, some of us were wondering if this is a topic that we could legitimately express anger over. Fortunately, I’m beginning to see some indication that the momentum is finally starting to build for economic reform.

This week’s spiritual wisdom is an excerpt from a prayer written by World Peace Prayer Society member Peace Representative in Greater Boston Penny Joy Snider-Light. The prayer was offered on September 19, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, at Harvard University’s Hillel Reform Service last month in honor of the UN International Day of Peace, which took place on September 21.

PRAYER

Dear G-d,

We give You this moment.

Pausing in spiritual reflection,
We join with humanity all over the world,
Who are re-affirming a commitment to serve
the essence of Peace – Shalom.

Will the “war on terror” never end?

Back in 2001, just after September 11, my college classmates and I traveled to Washington to protest the impending invasion of Afghanistan. We all knew that military retaliation was around the corner, and we dreaded the years of violence and bloodshed to follow. We wanted to tell our government that launching a war was not the way to make us feel safe. And we wanted the United States to think twice before raining bombs on civilians and giving millions a new reason to hate us.

It is deeply painful, eight years later, to witness not the end but the escalation of this war. In his op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Tikkun editor Michael Lerner lays out a compelling case for why we should end the war:

The escalation of war in Afghanistan may be only a stalking horse for an even larger war in Pakistan as the United States seeks to secure the nukes there that might fall into the hands of terrorists. These newly proposed wars are only the Obama phase of what is likely to be an endless 21st-century crusade called “the war on terrorism.”

Yet what we justifiably fear — terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon and detonating it in the United States — cannot be prevented by the United States imposing itself on one country after another in the Middle East or elsewhere. A more plausible strategy is to address the grievances and problems that lead people to want to strike out against the West in general, and the United States in particular …

So, it turns out that the fabled “total reexamination” of Afghanistan strategy is another by now all-too-familiar example of the Obama shell game. Why can’t leftists, progressives, and critical intellectuals face what a fraud this man is, and how snookered they have been?

Obama’s strategy toward the left is obvious. He cannot ignore the left, which after all secured him the nomination. He knows that if he simply follows his obviously rightist and neo-liberal policies, eventually there will be an explosion from his left. So periodically he arouses the left’s hopes by floating the possibility of a really progressive shift, a change in “mindset” as he put it during the campaign for the nomination. Examples of this include “the public option” and “the Biden strategy in Afghanistan.”

On October 2, 2009, we commemorated the 140th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi by having a discussion at my university. The title of the event was “Practicing Satyagraha in a Violent World: Conversations on Peace and Justice.” As Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I had invited Ted Glick as one of two speakers.

Ted Glick is a long-time activist and organizer who has worked on building grassroots resistance and raising the level of public debate on issues of militarism, state repression, environmentalism, tenant rights, community development and racial justice issues in the NY/NJ area. For the last four years Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a clean energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December 3rd actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. Most interestingly for our Forum, Ted has participated in and led numerous public actions of nonviolent civil disobedience and has courted arrest many times in that process. In May, 2006 he became the national coordinator of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council. For three and a half months in the fall of 2007 he ate no solid food as part of a climate emergency fast focused on getting Congress to pass strong climate legislation. On a national scale he has been a leader in coalition-building and independent politics efforts. From 1995 to 2005, he was the National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network.

So we got our Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun to bed yesterday and the first thing I want to do on this blog is personal. I wanted to write something about my son, Rowan, getting to 21 years old over a week ago, Sept 29, but what to write? It would take thought. I didn’t have time in the deadline madness. Here are two representative pictures, from preschool and from last week, when his band, A World Familiar, played their first real gig, at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles on Saturday.

Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah. This week I finally recorded the song I wrote about this tale on YouTube. Now others can learn the tune and sing it in their “Cakes” classes.

If you don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis: Jeremiah rants and rails against the Queen of Heaven, telling the people that worshipping Her is a betrayal of YHWH. (This actually proves to be historically incorrect, since YHWH had a consort for most of the years until the Babylonian exile — even in the temple in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah doesn’t know his archaeology, since he’s living during these turbulent times.) He threatens the people that if they revere any God or Goddess other than YHWH, God will punish them. Here’s how Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the people:

Last week in my homiletics class we were given an assignment to write a prayer that we can say to ourselves before giving a d’var Torah (sermon). I found this very useful in terms of thinking about what effect I would want my words to have. What would be the feeling in the room? What impact would I want to make? I can imagine it will be much easier now to write that 15 minute sermon that is due in a few weeks, having created this intention through prayer.

While it would be impossible to have a focused intention for all of our actions throughout the day, I am wondering how I can weave this sort of prayer creation into other aspects of my life. I am also thinking about the fixed prayer service that I pray almost every morning with my community at school (in more and less traditional ways). In what ways do my personal intentions/prayers interact with the liturgy? Is there a way to pray a set service in community, yet to have a personally meaningful experience that answers my seemingly-individual needs?

For now, here is the prayer I wrote. I am sure it will evolve as I continue to learn:

Creative Source of the Universe

May I begin from a place of quiet stillness
May I access my relationship to You, and from that place speak
May I be calm and centered, fully present in body, mind and spirit
May what I say be gentle and powerful, powerful and gentle
May my words resonate, heal, melt, expand, nurture, challenge, comfort, move
May they cause people’s hearts to beat faster, their eyes to tear, their spirits to soften, their minds to open
May I tune into the rhythm of life around and within me and be guided by the pulse
May I help create openings where the energy of life can freely flow
May I be in service to the highest good for all

If you are anywhere within the vicinity of New York City get on your bike and go down there this weekend for the premiere of “the Yes Men Fix The World.”

The fun they are getting up to look enticing. They’re teaming up with the Raging Grannies, Gray Panthers and Granny Peace Brigade, the Green Candidate for Mayor, Reverend Billy, in the 2007 doc, What Would Jesus Buy, plus CODEPINK and I don’t who else. On Thursday Oct 8 they say:

“We’ll be leading a rowdy-as-usual crowd from the 8pm screening across town to a very special “Hijinx” Premiere Party at the Delancey Lounge, hosted by some of New York City’s most revved-up muckrakers. Unfortunately for Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a massive new Whole Foods store on Houston and Bowery sits smack-dab in the middle of that crosstown march. Let’s just say that the well-fed CEO may continue to regret his recent reactionary comments on health care reform. (Do big-box stores have stupidity insurance?)”

You might not get that if you hadn’t heard that said Mackey gave his opinion that if anyone did not have health insurance it was their own fault. I met someone at a Whole Foods once, for lunch, since hearing that and have regretted it since–you won’t catch me there again.

The Yes Men Fix the World Official Trailer from Bink on Vimeo.

I’ve been thinking recently of Buddha Park, which Diana and I visited in Laos almost five years ago. There are ways it seems less bizarre now than it did at the time, and ways in which it seems even stranger. I guess some explanation is needed. (And since a picture is still worth over 900 words (the exchange rate has dropped slightly with the advent of digital cameras) visit the Buddha Park page in Tikkun Daily’s art gallery!)

Buddha Park (more formally known as Xieng Khuan) is one of two sculpture parks created by Bunleua, an apostate Buddhist monk who created his own religion, a syncretic blend of Buddhism and Hinduism. Both Buddha Park, built in 1958, and Sala Keoku, created in 1977, (I saw it in 1988, just across the Mekong river in Thailand) feature giant concrete sculptures of major and minor Hindu and Buddhist deities, interspersed with more than a few pinches of surrealism. At the entrance of Buddha Park there’s a giant three-story pumpkin, with three floors representing hell, earth, and heaven. One walks in through the demon mouth, and follows a spiral staircase to the top, past an interior sculpture garden featuring (amongst much else) the demons and gods grinding the milk of immortality from Mount Meru on the back of the giant turtle on which the world rests.

From the top of the Great Pumpkin you look out over the park, which is about the size of two football fields. There’s a giant reclining Buddha down one side, and a tower of Hindu Deities (Shiva, Durga, etc) at the other end. Lots of beautiful flower shrubs growing between the 200+ other sculptures … some recognizable, some (a three-headed elephant? A split-tailed alligator whose tail supports the world?) not. It’s really one of those places that is a whole lot like nothing you’ve ever seen. Even being there, it was hard to believe.

From Barbara Bash’s beautiful blog True Nature. Barbara is a Buddhist, a calligrapher, artist and writer of children’s books and of a memoir of a year’s quest for connection with spirit and nature which is destined to be a classic. It’s worth going to her blog just to see what happens to this picture of the tips of the corn. I am tempted to say that if you are short of a present for a special person this Christmas Chanukah Kwanzaa Solstice, you might want to look at that memoir, but we are four hours away from putting an issue to Tikkun to bed in which we are promoting the idea of giving people home made things and services you can perform…. Barbara was a neighbor and dear friend of ours back in the Hudson Valley before we moved to Berkeley so I could work on Tikkun. We miss her!

[WARNING! DO NOT TRY TO LINK TO CONSERVAPEDIA FROM DAILY KOS, HUFFINGTON POST OR THIS DIARY...A BLOCK MIGHT GO UP...maybe its a coincidence, maybe not, but I can't access the site from this computer anymore after linking. I will type out the address so you can cut and paste into the toolbar...]

Remember Phyllis Schlafly, the Queen of conservative religious “feminism” from the late 60s through the 80s? Well she’s got a son (Andy, BSE, JD, ABCDEFG), who is funnier than David Letterman. Except the poor guy is trying to be serious.

In 2006, Andy burst onto the scene with Conservapedia, a right wing version of wikipedia minus its “liberal, anti-Christian bias,” (not to mention all structural defects that encourage “liberal” biases such as fact-checking, offering proof, etc.).

About six months ago, Andy drew international attention to Conservapedia, when he challenged Dr. Richard Lenski’s groundbreaking study of the evolution of e coli bacteria.

Lenski found, after 20 years of painstaking research, that one descendent generation of his original e coli colony mutated, enabling it to feed off of a citrate solution, where as other descendant strains did not. Shlafly did not like the assumption that e coli evolves. He fired off a letter, artfully combining breathtaking arrogance with ignorance to Lenski demanding that the scientist produce his data.

Lenski responded to Schlafly by politely suggesting he actually read the article as it included the data. Undeterred, Schlafly actually posted a second equally idiotic letter and was decimated by a decidedly less polite, but extremely funny Lenski response. The entire dialogue can be found here.

As we drove into the parking lot at the high school in Palo Alto Sunday evening, we were greeted by a group of about two dozen protesters, waving American and Israeli flags, and holding signs. One woman moved her sign so that I could see it clearly as I drove past her… “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” Further down the line a man pushed his sign towards my window emblazoned with the horrific symbol of Nazi Germany, the Swastika.

We are inching towards our magazine print deadline of tomorrow noon and I haven’t had any time to blog but must throw up this, sent by my friend Elaine Lee. I’m just copying straight from the Center for American Progress email:

The Rise of Progressive Religious Activists

By Valerie Shen, Sally Steenland | October 1, 2009

Progressive religious activists have grown in size and clout over the past four years. Faith groups across the country have gained attention for their work on issues ranging from poverty and the environment to health care and torture. They have organized congregations, trained leaders, created strategic messages, and sought common ground. In so doing, they have challenged the decades-long monopoly that conservative religious activists have held in the public square, as well as the perception that the “religious view” on policy issues is automatically a conservative one.

Now comes a new research study that looks at both conservative and progressive religious activists and finds significant differences between them – especially in the diversity of their ranks, the issues they claim as most important, and their views toward religion.

How many of us know what it is like to have someone love us enough to go all the way to the wall for us?

I was thinking about this question yesterday, and about how it relates to our struggles for social justice. In the “praise and worship” part of our service, we sang “Everybody Ought to Know,” a song that often makes me squirm amidst our extremely diverse congregation, which draws people from a variety of faith traditions to walk together what we call the “Jesus path” (which doesn’t require that you identify as Christian). The lyrics go

Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Who Jesus is.

Oh, he’s the lily of the valley.
He’s the bright and morning star.
He’s the fairest of ten thousand, and
Everybody oughtta know.

See what I mean? It smacks of Christian exceptionalism and easily conjures up theologies that threaten nonchristians with eternal hellfire. I’m way too much of a universalist for that.

But yesterday I heard it differently.

A January 2008 study conducted by United for a Fair Economy estimated that the sub-prime mortgage crisis we were beginning to experience at that time would ultimately result in a net loss of $164-213 billion in assets for people of color. A friend pointed out to me that this was, in market terms, almost certainly the largest transfer of wealth away from black people in a very long history of economic injustice. By all accounts, the subprime crisis was the result of bad lending policies by banks who wanted to capitalize on a lucrative securities market.

As banks reported huge losses and markets took a dive in the winter of 2008, I was struck by an article titled, “Islamic banks shielded from subprime.” At that point, the author said, conventional global banks like CitiGroup and UBS had already written down more than $80 billion in losses. Islamic banks, however, reported almost no loss at all. Because sharia law (like the Bible) forbids usury, Islamic banks do not charge interest or trade debt. “Many of these conventional products that have been under stress lately are very complex and need special risk management tools,” explained Rasheed al-Maraj, the governor of Bahrain’s central bank. “In Islamic banking you will not have this kind of thing. Some of these products would not be sharia accepted.”

This got me interested in Islamic banking, so I did a little research. It turns out that Muslims have a long history of practicing the tactic of economic friendship that Jesus taught when he said, “use money to make friends for yourselves” (Luke 16:9). When members of the community need money for a large purchase, they typically borrow it from fellow Muslims. But Islamic law’s ban on riba – or interest – has forced the Muslim community to think differently about money lending. If you can’t make money on money, banking isn’t the big business we often imagine it to be in the West. “We are not run-of-the-mill marketing people who find a niche and run with it,” says Yahia Abdul-Rahman, the CEO of Lariba, an Islamic bank based in Pasadena, California. “We are humble servants of the community.”

Cropped from a photo of "pro" and "anti" Glenn Beck protesters in Beck's hometown of Mt. Vernon, Washington, outside the venue where Beck received the ceremonial key to the town. Credit Erna-Louisa, Wikimedia Commons.

I just got this email from my friend Taylor Eskew in New York. She’s a Quaker, an engineer, my neighbor for years, a fun person and a good person.

I have no idea how to start this for real but. . .

If you are as disheartened by the tone and content of many of the demonstrations, upset by carrying guns in public places, and wondering what to do about it . . .

How about boycotting Fox?

Craig Kielburger and the Dalai Lama at We Day Vancouver

Imagine thousands and thousands of teens and tweens in a gigantic auditorium, leaping out of their seats, screaming, applauding wildly…… Is it a Jonas Brothers concert? Hannah Montana? Nope – those kids were going nuts at the We Day gathering in Vancouver as Free the Children founder Craig Kielburger introduced the Dalai Lama to talk about how kids could change the world. If you needed just a bit of hope that the next generation was ready to build a better world than the one we have created, this was the perfect boost. And, if you want to take part in this revolution, you’re not too old to join in. The name “We Day” comes from the idea that it is time to turn the “Me” into “We.”