We usually hear about Judgment Day in the context of our impending doom for not adhering to the commandments of God (or some specific interpretation thereof). Zealous imams tell us stories of Judgment Day to inspire fear, guilt and repentance. More often than not we leave those khutbas feeling despondent or even resentful at the prospect of a final Judgment Day.

But Judgment Day isn’t just about doling out punishment. It’s primary purpose is justice:

“But how (will they fare) when we gather them together against a day about which there is no doubt, and each soul will be paid out just what it has earned, without (favor or) injustice?” Quran, Surah 3 Verse 25

Any person with a spiritual bone in their body has been overwhelmed at one point or another by the sheer volume of injustice in the world. We may have even become depressed or immobilized from obsessing over these conditions.

Visit Tikkun Daily’s Art Gallery for more images Michael Ferris Jr.’s sculptures.

Most religions have long traditions of incorporating artwork into their practice: glass-stained windows, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and statuary in temples are just some of the many forms. This bond between art-making and spiritual practice is clear in the work of Michael Ferris Jr., whose wood sculptures translate individuals into iconic and ambiguous monuments. He says:

When I work on these pieces I have my own personal, spiritual feelings. I get in touch with whatever that is, it’s a bit of a mystery, and I let it be a mystery.

I can imagine the conversation I would have with someone who supports Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban. They might tell me apologetically that they have nothing against me personally, or against my same-sex relationship of almost 13 years, but that marriage is … different, not for me. They might tell me calmly that my sexual brokenness can be healed if I will only accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, and that the state has no business condoning sin.

For years, I would have told them that it was a matter of equal rights, and that society should stand behind same-sex couples who want to marry because they are just as much in love as any opposite-sex couple. I would have said marriage is marriage, regardless of the couple saying “I do,” and that conservative religion has no business intruding on the state. I might have gone so far as to say that same-sex marriage should be legal as a matter of religious freedom, not to mention the hundreds of state and federal rights now systematically denied to same-sex couples because we cannot legally marry.

Today, without denying the truth of the above arguments, I would say something different, something much more controversial: as long as we live in a society that treats marriage as a matter of state interest and prioritizes it above other types of relationships, same-sex couples must be allowed to marry for spiritual reasons. Same-sex marriage is a spiritual matter for the couples involved and for society as a whole. Spirituality here is not opposed to politics, but is of a piece with it.

Saturday June 26th, the anti-G20 demonstration in Toronto was planned to start at 1 pm. I had been uncertain as to whether to go; originally a group of Tikkun Toronto veterans had planned an alternative demonstration, focussed around the slogan, “Open your heart to what matters more.” But the unexpected death of the brother of one core member, and difficulties around getting permission, and the predictions of violence and anarchy that the media had been purveying had reduced our enthusiasm below the critical mass we needed to make it happen. Perhaps, I thought, I don’t need to go. But the MSM descriptions of protesters against the G20 as “thugs and anarchists”, the spending of $1.2 billion on the summit, the revelation of new powers to arrest and detain that the police had been secretly given all made me feel that my right to peacefully gather with my peers was worth coming out to defend. As governments try to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor, lowering taxes on corporations and offering billions to financial institutions that have become too big to fail, surely someone should speak up. And if not me, then who? I created a “My Canada WAS a free country” t-shirt, and went down to the rally, humming the Rolling Stones’ “I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse”.

The Black Bloc at the G20 demo in Toronto

In front of Queen’s Park, the Ontario provincial legislature, there were about 25,000 people gathered. While waiting for the speeches, they chanted,”The people united, will never be defeated.” After years of hearing this, I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t sure I still believed this. But as I wandered around, looking for all the friends and fellow travellers I knew were also there, I realized that it wasn’t really relevant, because while these people may have been many things, they weren’t united. Among the groups were the Ontario Federation of Labour (the organizers), CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees), assorted teachers’ unions, the Black Bloc, the Iranian and Iraqi communist parties (marching together!) , independent Kashmir, independent Khalistan, independent Palestine, independent Quebec, the Animal Liberation Front, the American Tea Party, “9/11 Was An Inside Job”, a lot of Trotskyist-Socialist-Marxist groups all selling newspapers, Greenpeace, an anti child-abuse group (are the G20 pro child-abuse?), a person with a sign protesting the mind-rays she claimed the government was using to control what people think, and the Judean People’s Front. (OK, I’m lying about them). But whatever this crowd might have been called, it wasn’t united.

Someone asked me recently why I have gravitated toward the church as a context for justice work. Is there something different, he asked, about doing social change work from a Christian perspective, or is it just convenient to work within a body of people who are already assembled?

It’s a good question, and it’s one that both the Christian lectionary of recent weeks and my life have been speaking to in surprising and disorienting ways.

Tikkun note: Rabbi Lerner is in the midst of prayer for healing of all people hurt in the Israeli assault on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, including Israeli soldiers as well as anyone else hurt, and their families

David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine has published an article about our recent Network of Spiritual Progressives national conference in DC under the absurdist headline “Rabbi of Hate.” I am including some representative paragraphs and comments (go here if you have the stomach to read more), and then my response on their site. Some quotes from the article itself:

Tikkun Rabbi Michael Lerner, the one-time “politics of meaning” guru to the pre-presidential Clintons until he became politically inexpedient, is now blasting away at the Obama Administration. Lerner recently convened his Network of Spiritual Progressives in Washington, D.C. for a Religious Left gabfest. And much of it was gripping [I'm glad they thought so--or did they mean griping?] about President Obama’s spiritual failure to remain ideologically pure, in the eyes of leftist clerics and activists.

Image courtesy of FlickrCC/Darwin Bell

It’s Thursday night Chi Kung, and we are cultivating energy between our palms and then our own palms and a partner’s. Our teacher instructs us to remember a time when we felt pure joy, to recall it vividly, completely in every cell, to embody joy in this moment. Then he says: Bring this joy into your hands. Offer it as a gift to the world.

Joy springs, wells, swells between our palms. I see joy spilling over the world, spreading over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, touching all the lives, feathered, finned and human, that have been and are being so devastated by the ongoing disaster. The joy stays with me after I leave class and into the next day. I realize it has been a long time since I have allowed myself to open to joy — not since April 20th at least. Since then, whether or not I am consciously thinking of the oil disaster, I feel it in my body, I carry it with me. Not as a noble, if futile, gesture, but simply because, like all of us, I am seventy percent ocean. How can all be well with me if all is not well with the sea?

A long time ago, I had a dream in which a religious authority reproached me for feeling joy in a world where there was hunger, poverty, oppression, war (this was before environmental depredation had made the list). In the dream I dared to answer the authority: “Joy is part of God’s equation.” Since I flunked algebra and am mathematically inept, equation was and is an unusual metaphor for me. Perhaps that is why the dream phrase stayed with me all these years, even as the internalized voice of the reproachful authority continues to rebuke me.

Free Speech TV interviewed me at the Social Forum. They are on cable and increasingly web-based. I can’t work out how to find all their Social Forum coverage on their website: maybe one of you can work that out. I think I’ve only been on TV about three times in my life and I find myself too embarrassed to watch this, but am told it is watchable.

When I read Sharif Abdullah’s Creating a World that Works for All, one of the ideas that really stood out to me was that when the Exxon Valdez crashed, it was delivering my oil to me. It wasn’t someone else’s oil. I was using it just like the vast, vast majority of people in this country. This was radical non-separation for me. It has stayed with me, and continues to inform my investigations about how to approach the current cluster of challenges we are facing in the world.

From http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/

Recently, I came across another example of such radical expression. This time it was a poem by Chun Yu, a fellow member in a writing group. Chun is a polymer scientist, environmentally concerned citizen, poet, and Buddhist practitioner. In her poem – The Game of Bonding – the Story of Plastics, from which I am quoting passages below, she practices non-separation in bringing together all parts of herself. She also invites the readers to practice non-separation. What would it be like to transcend the duality, to recognize continuity even with a substance that so many consider dangerous? I am sharing parts of this poem and my musings, in the hopes of inspiring others to experiment with thinking beyond our familiar categories, whatever they are for you.

What are plastics
But the same materials made of
You and me?
Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen…
What are they, but like us

Right away my breath changes as I grasp the depth of unconscious separation I had created.

From the opening day march at the Detroit US Social Forum. Credit: a_vifs/flickr.

I spent last week at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I have got used to seeing a preponderance of baby boomers at left demos and conferences, but this was different: tons of young people, and a wide range of everybody. That was super-encouraging.

These days the US Social Forum is the largest massing of radical grassroots activists on the left in this country. There have been annual World Social Forums since the first one in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and this is the second specifically US Social Forum, after one in Atlanta in 2007. Over 20,000 people apparently registered, and it’s being reported that 15,000 attended, though I don’t know how definitive that is. There were over 1200 workshops. I spent over ten hours in workshops I was running or assisting in presenting myself, and had some wonderful experiences at them.

Guess what? Arizona is more liberal than Canada, or at least, the provincial government of Ontario.

Ontario passed legislation giving police new identification-demand and search powers– and most disturbing of all, this legislation was passed in secret.

At least in Arizona, SB1070 was debated and passed in public.

From The Ottawa Citizen:

The Ontario government secretly passed legislation giving police sweeping new powers for the duration of the G8 and G20 summits.Police are now able to jail anyone who refuses to furnish identification and submit to a search while within five metres of a designated security zone in downtown Toronto.

I want your opinion about something. I’m a liberal religious person who doesn’t believe in doctrines, dogma or a supernatural God. 19% of members in my tradition identify as atheist, 30% as agnostic and the rest Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Pagan or otherwise. Many of us have been wounded by the bigotry, homophobia and dogma in the religions we grew up in and find refuge, support and community in my tradition. We come together on Sunday mornings to enjoy music and hear sermons about social justice, the power of community and how to live inspiring and meaningful lives. Some ministers may use the word God in an all-inclusive way but most choose to avoid the term because of its troubled history. Here’s my question for you: Should I abandon my tradition because liberal and moderate religion serves to justify the extremes? Is my participation in this religious institution providing legitimacy and credibility for fundamentalism, violence, oppression and bigotry done in the name of religion? I’m studying to be a minister in this tradition. It’s called Unitarian Universalism. Am I guilty by association? Should I jump ship? What do you think?

I know what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins would tell me. They are two of the new atheists most responsible for spreading this idea about liberal and moderate religion justifying the extremes. Liberals are “aiding and abetting” the most dangerous religions because they give them credibility by participating in the institution of religion itself. Sam Harris states that moderates are “in large part responsible for the religious conflict in our world” and “Religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” And Richard Dawkins states, “The teachings of “moderate” religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.” And when asked about why he lumps liberal religions like Unitarianism in with fundamentalism Hitchens responded a reference to Camus stating that he believes all religion is comparable to rats and vermin.

Bonobo in the wild

Journalism about biology often tells us more about our cultural assumptions and prejudices than about the science itself. Nicholas Wade’s most recent article in the New York Times about chimpanzees is no exception. After introducing us to John Mitani, the main chimp researcher in his piece, Wade says

Most days the male chimps behave a lot like frat boys, making a lot of noise or beating each other up. But once every 10 to 14 days, they do something more adult and cooperative: they wage war.

When I read those sentences, my mouth dropped open. My definition of cooperation doesn’t encompass war. In fact, cooperation and conflict are opposites as far as I can tell. And if I were a “frat boy,” I would have some difficulties with Wade’s initial comparison. In fact, as an adult human, I have a problem with all the assumptions that undergird Wade’s article.

Visit Tikkun Daily’s Art Gallery for more images of the “Welcome” installation.

Three thousand plastic cups, water, and food coloring. This, Murat Musulluoglu tells me, is how “Welcome” is made. The project took place in various public parks in New York City, and Musulluoglu tells me he intended it to be collaborative:

Here, the space between the art, the artist and the public gets eliminated. The work brings everyone together. The initial work is a stage for people to initiate new relationships and to break down boundaries between people. It is a collective process that will be executed in public space.

By dismissing McChrystal, did President Obama reassert civilian authority over the military, pull his “national security” team together, and enhance the power of our democracy? So it would seem. But in fact, the dismissal provides a classic example of what Marxists used to call ideology: it represents reality in an inverted form. The truth is that the dismissal of McCrystal is another giant step in the defense establishment’s control over American policy. Let me explain.

The key thing is to understand the Rolling Stone story. The news accounts have provided a series of speculations concerning “how this could have happened” including the role of alcohol, hardworking military men unwinding after 18-hour days, or (my favorite) the Icelandic volcano that supposedly trapped McChrystal, his team and the reporter (Michael Hastings) in a Paris hotel for a week during which the General and his aides let their guard down.

In fact, nothing like that occurred. Duncan Boothby, McCrystal’s PR man who has since resigned, carefully arranged for the story. From the moment that Hastings arrived he was shocked at how open and candid McChrystal and his aides were about their vituperative opinions. According to Eric Bates, Rolling Stone‘s editor, every insult in the piece including the view that McChrystal found Obama distant, uninformed and intimidated, and the slams at Eikenberry, Biden and Holbrooke were repeatedly run by McChrystal for approval, which was forthcoming. Many other things that were said were off the record, and none of these were printed. In other words, this was no careless thoughtless loose talk. McChrystal and his aides deliberately planted this story, pretty much as it was written. The question is what were they thinking?

This past week Senator Al Franken spoke out against the activist style of the Supreme Court, specifically addressing the favor given to corporations over individuals in its rulings. (His full speech is transcribed on the Huffington Post.)

Most Americans are well aware that our democratic process is being unfairly skewed toward the rich and powerful through lobbying, campaign contributions and backroom deals. There’s no mystery here. Democracy is only as good as the individuals who participate in it. When the democratic process is corrupted, the liberties of individuals are eroded and those who have the money and influence are given preference.

The foundation of a democratic society is not simply having a constitution. (Many democratic nations such as Pakistan have constitutions yet suffer from extreme corruption at the highest levels.) Successful governance depends on the founding document being upheld and enforced by a healthy judiciary system. Accountability is key in making sure laws are enforced and equality under the law is ensured.

But when certain people or entities are able to buy their way out of accountability, or worse, able to redefine accountability because they have an “in” with the entity that determines the laws of the land, they are subverting the very idea of democracy.

As Franken so eloquently put it:

Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most visible Muslims in Europe. Charismatic, loved, hated, feared. A source of inspiration for many young European Muslims, a reference; suspected and accused of double talk by many non-Muslims.

I consider him a friend; I wrote a review for Tikkun, defending him against Caroline Fourest’s book attacking him.

At a conference that I helped to organize, Ramadan was coming to speak. There were also two Muslim imam friends present, and I asked each in private what they honestly thought of him. One told me: “I hope that I don’t shock you, but I think that he is the Martin Luther of Islam.” The second said: “He is a dangerous reformer.” Interesting. They seem to agree, I thought!

Personally, I like and trust him. But I sometimes wonder whether I’m too trusting by nature. Am I naïve? Blind to the real dangers around? The other day, I met an academic, Swiss, who worked with Ramadan for several years. He told me that he’d been a little suspicious, given the things that he’d heard in the media. He found friends whose knowledge of the Koran and of Arabic was up to the task, and asked them to discretely check. Was there any suspicion of the much discussed “double language”? He also got to know the family and the children. “Children can’t fool you,” he said — and he found no trace of any sinister, hidden message.

Perhaps trust is not such a bad default mode for our relationships?

When nations make decisions that keep a cycle of violence going, it is appropriate to bring critique to bear on those decisions. When nations make decisions that help break the cycle of violence, that helps to move the world one centimeter, one inch, closer to just peace, it is appropriate to give that decision its proper respect.

When the government of Israel decided to ease its policy regarding the flow of goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza, it was a decision worthy of recognition and of gratitude. For years, critics of the policy, both inside and outside of Israel have called on the government of Israel to ease the restriction against Gaza. Gaza has been described as a big prison. The blockade is violence. It is structural violence that deprives people of the materials they need to support a decent standard of living. Such violence is a violation of human dignity. Peace will only come when people have the material they need to sustain life and the spiritual and psychological security that brings joy into life, when they can create the conditions that make life worth living.

Much that was on the list of things that could not be brought into Gaza were items that denied both sustenance and joy to people in Gaza. This kind of violence invited retaliatory violence and hatred. To deny people pipes for clean water, cement to build houses and chocolate is an injustice. It is not what ordinary people deserve, even if their leadership is unwise in its rhetoric and policies. Peace will come on earth the instant everyone begins to do justice no matter what the Other does.

This new policy of the government of Israel is more just than the old policy. It is full of caveats and caution, but such is reasonable for a nation whose primary concern is security. The six steps the government plans to implement are sensible and welcome. In a statement issued June 20, 2010, Israel committed to:

This week’s spiritual wisdom was sent to us by a member of the Faith and Spirituality group with which Tikkun is working to plan many workshops, a service, and a sacred space at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, June 22-26. The member, Louisa Davis, suggested this poem as a blessing for the social change work taking place at the forum:

Another World is Possible

by Rose Flint

We can dream it in, with our eyes

Open to this Beauty, to all

That Earth gives each of us, each day

Those miracles of dark and light–

Rainlight, dawn, sun moon, snow, storm grey

And the wide fields of night always

Somewhere opening their flower

stars – this, this! Another world is

Last week I posted a piece called Three Ring Circus: The Thrill of Couples Counseling. Using the circus as a metaphor, I described my work as a couples’ counselor. In response, a number of people commented that couples counseling had not worked for them and/or that it was not affordable. I felt that a second post on couples counseling was in order.

Affordability: Some counselors (like me) offer a sliding scale, one end of which is quite modest. In my county, mental health services also offer a sliding scale based on income. They do not list couples counseling among the available services, but when an individual seeks counseling, the partner or the whole family can be brought into the process. Couples’ counseling often progresses more quickly than individual counseling. Even a few sessions can bring clarity. It can be a wise investment that may save a lot of money and heartache in the long run.

Purpose: Last week I described a particular outcome: (metaphorically flying happily ever after on the trapeze). I later regretted that conclusion, because in couples counseling it is only one possibility. The purpose of counseling isn’t to preserve a partnership no matter what but to explore how it is working, where it is stuck or breaking down, if it can be healed, and whether or not both people want to remain in the relationship — or should. Counseling can include reaching a decision to separate and how to go about separating in a way that respects and protects each person.

When I told my 97-year-old mother-in-law today’s blog topic, she said. “Not every relationship should be a marriage. People should have affairs! It is a perfectly acceptable.”