I confess that it is incongruous for a peace theorist to recommend that people go to see a flag-waving war movie. The contradictions of this notwithstanding, I hope that people will go to see Red Tails, the movie about the Tuskegee Airmen produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway. I urge people to see the movie so that it will make money and thereby take away one Hollywood excuse for why it does not make more movies about African-American heroes and sheroes. If this movie makes money, perhaps it will be easier to get big-screen movies or television movies or mini-series made about people such as African-American diplomat Ralph Bunch or activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune and others.

George Lucas spoke with Jon Stewart about the difficulty in getting Red Tails made. African-Americans are supporting the movie; however, this is an important movie for everyone to support.

First, I say and say again that war is the worst crime that humanity perpetuates against itself. Mahatma Gandhi was correct when he called war organized murder. Former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was also right when he said “war is always the sanction of failure.” When the first projectile flies, we see a failure of imagination, communication and diplomacy. Just peace theory hopes to make the principles of just peace accepted universal principles that will guide the moral thinking and political commitments of people across the globe.

When people ask me the wolf at the door question – what does the world do with people such as Hitler and regimes such as the National Socialists in Germany when they threaten the world’s security? – I say that peacemaking is a day to day work and that the logic of peace ought to make the logic of war unthinkable. We stop the wolf before he gets to the door. The world is not there yet.

“God does not call us to be successful. God calls us to be faithful.” Prathia Hall

I learned this wisdom from Prathia Hall, an African-American preacher/teacher/civil rights activist/scholar friend. She was my predecessor in Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH. I was also privileged to spend time with her at the end of her life in 2002 when I moved to the Boston area to teach at Andover Newton Theological School. Again, I was arriving as she was leaving.

It was Prathia Hall’s “I Have a Dream” prayer that was the inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ” I Have a Dream” speech. Prathia Hall was of the generation that cleared away much of the conceptual resistance to the idea of black-woman-as-scholar that made my way in the world easier. She knew from her experience as a trailblazer that the path of progress is long and hard, and that we would have to fight the same battles over and over again. She constantly reminded me that our duty is to keep on keeping on, to be faithful in our love and in our work even though it may not seem at the time that we are having success. The goal is justice, including economic and social justice.

Faithfulness is the steadfast, immovable, determined, loyal, conscientious, commitment to a standard, an ideal, or goal. Many of us who believe in God believe that God, transcendence, Divine Love, compels us to a particular work. We feel an irresistible mystery urging us on. The question for many of us is whether this “call” is from something outside of us, or rather an expression of something within, a deep desire that is also a mystery. That divine command, the imperative placed on our lives, could be a combination of both.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has taken to quoting a hymn of the American civil religion.

“Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. America! America! God shed his grace on thee and crown thy good with brother hood from sea to shining sea.”

Religion is the transcendence that serves as ligature to bind us together, and for many Americans, America is that transcendence. Americanism becomes religion. Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Atheist, Jewish and others all bend the knee to the nation and to its God.

The problem with the civil religion is that its transcendence is not transcendent enough. Its moral horizons are limited to the short-term interests of the nation as perceived by flawed individuals working within a deeply flawed political/economy. And when a politician stands up and proclaims his love for the country while loading his stump speeches with lies upon lies, that moral horizon has dwindled down to the puny size of one politician’s political ambitions.

Yet, even the traditions of the civil religion recognize that the country is ever in the process of perfection. Verse two of the hymn Romney quotes says:

“O beautiful for pilgrim’s feet, whose stern impassioned stress a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness: America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm they soul in self control, thy liberty in law.”

This year, I finished my Christmas shopping early. Two telephone calls to two catalogues and voila, my shopping was done. I made these calls shortly after Thanksgiving and the first week in December, my packages arrived. My son put up the Christmas tree early. So, I had plenty of time to take a week and go up to the North Pole to help Santa.

Aside from the elves and his full-time workers, some of us volunteer during the holidays to come up and help with the rush that the season brings. Everything is on computer now. But, letters still come in with children’s wish lists and that data must be entered and then cross checked against the naughty and nice list. However, Santa has such a generous heart that if he could, every child would get something. Then, there is the work of keeping track of address changes. Since the economic downturn, Santa and his helpers have had to do more work to track down those children whose families have lost their houses due to foreclosure or other difficult circumstances. Santa thunders with anger whenever he sees yet another situation of a child and h/er family becoming homeless.

“How in the name of all that is holy can a country as rich as the United States allow such a thing to happen?” he asks at the top of his voice. He is most definitely NOT a jolly old man when the issue of poverty in the world, especially poverty among children, raises its ugly head. Yet, it is an ugliness that he insists that we tackle when we return to our home countries. (Note: Santa gets volunteers from all over the world.)

Christopher Hitchens has died.

I pause to take note of his passing because I loved him, and I love him still.  I love him in the same way that I love thinkers and writers, artists and ordinary people who live their lives and who do their work with skill, integrity, determination and courage.  He wrote with an authenticity of cool.

I loved him because he gave me words.  Whenever I sat down to read his work, I made certain that I had my dictionary within reach so that I could look up the words I knew he would introduce to my mind. I loved his contrarianism, and I agreed with much of it.  He was right to indict Henry Kissinger and by extension the approach to foreign policy that he represented.  He was right to defend justice for the Palestinians.  He was wrong about the Iraq War, but I understood his arguments,

I am a believer who believes that God Is.  I thought his anti-theistic challenge was a good thing for those of us who believe in God.  It made me ask:  How deep is my Love?  I believe that God is LOVE, emphasis on the LOVE.  This is my confession of faith because most people who do not, who cannot believe in God or religion or this or that religious or spiritual tradition can believe in love.  They themselves have loved, and they have been loved.  This capacity to love and to be loved is the spiritual aspect of humanity and of creation that is not only rational but is also transrational and indestructible.

The wall that we think we build between life and death, between good and evil, dissolves into mist on All Hallows Eve.

And the shadow of death looms large over us reminding us of our earthly mortality and our complicated selves.

We wear the masks that reveal our internal Otherness. We costume ourselves in our fantasies and look our personal monsters in the face.

On All Hallows Eve we see our own all too human un-holy-ness. And we are not afraid.

#OWS and the importance of the work of worship

Like many words in any language, the word “occupation” has multiple meanings. The English word “occupation” like the word “occupy” derives from the Latin work occupare which means employ, seize and take. When we think about occupation, we think about one’s vocation, the way one earns a living. In a more negative sense of the word, we think about invasion, conquest and control of territory by a foreign force. And when we think of occupation as holding or possessing a place, we understand that the place we occupy also occupies us.

So, to occupy a place requires time and effort. It is a vocation. It is a job. If the Occupy Movement is to go forward and achieve its objectives, it will require vision, organization, commitment love and endurance for the long run. It will require spiritual strength and space to continue when cold winds blow, when icy rain and freezing snow falls. Winter cares nothing about our political economy, and winter is coming. Thus, to sustain the movement, faith communities ought to extend hospitality and commensality to people who are working for social and economic justice both in the United States and in the world. For the movement to make a measurable difference in the lives of people, it must necessarily become political.

I confess. I am an outlier.

Whenever one of the world’s bad actors is killed – Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay, Osama bin Laden, and now Muammar el-Qaddafi – I do not feel a sense of jubilation. I am sad. All of these men whose evil acts caused suffering beyond measure are still human beings who have families who will mourn their loss.

When Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed during the Iraq War, I heard an American mother of a warrior fighting in Iraq say that she could not celebrate their deaths because she felt sympathy for their mother. This woman had lost two of her children that day. I am always sad when these monsters who made their mark on the world through violence dies because I remember that someone has lost h/er husband, father, brother, or son. I hope and pray that the violence that killed them does not lead to even more retaliatory violence.

There are times in life when a soul needs to hear Barbra Streisand singing “Avinu Malkeinu.” It needs to hear Verdi’s Requiem. It needs to hear John Coltrane’s saxophone screaming A Love Supreme. Peace Day 2011 was such a day. Peace Day, the UN International Day of Peace and Global Ceasefire falls on September 21 every year. It coincides with the opening session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The day represents a hope that a time will come when humanity will end its violent conflicts. Peace One Day.

Since 2008, I try to publish one or more short essays to honor Peace Day, and I had intended the same for this year. I thought about writing something about peace as a contagion. I had not yet decided whether to write it as fiction or as a proposal. The weekend before Peace Day, I went to see the movie Contagion. I thought it might give me some ideas.

The movie is about a virus that spreads through touch. An infected person can touch another person or a surface, leave the contagion, and someone else touching the same surface can pick-up the contagion. Panic sets in. Social order breaks down. I tried to imagine the opposite. I tried to imagine a world where humankind has the power to think peace, breathe peace, and pass the peace through touch. Imagine a world where we could leave traces of our own peace on surfaces for a complete stranger to catch with only a touch.

But, when Peace Day came, I was no longer interested in thinking about peace as a contagion. It was the opening day of the UN General Assembly, and the world awaited what President Obama would say about the Palestinian plan to apply for full UN membership as an independent state. I also was eager to hear what the president would say. In this impasse between Israel’s need for security and the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for an independent state clouds were gathering in my soul.

At the same time, for me, there was another sad cloud looming over the day – the scheduled execution of Troy Davis. The State of Georgia had scheduled Davis’ execution on Peace Day. Did not the idea of global cease fire include state executions? I felt dispirited because clearly we have much more work to do to inform people about Peace Day and its possibilities. However, more than that, I was one of more than a million people across the globe who signed petitions to sop the execution of Troy Davis.

I invite someone to create the following video and post it on YouTube.

A class of school children with their hands over their hearts reciting the Pledge of Allegiance:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag,”

A group of politicians dressed in business suits with campaign sings in the background, wearing buttons that say vote for me:

“I pledge allegiance to the pledge,”

Biblical wisdom teaches: “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling.”

Prognostications regarding the 2012 elections that predict President Obama will be a one-term president are very wide of the mark. Those who say that he is not a good leader are also mistaken. The error comes because many people, especially the Republicans, have misread the results of the 2010 elections, and many of the president’s supporters, especially among the punditocracy, do not understand the spiritual value of cool.

During and after the debate around health-care reform, Republicans mischaracterized the reform to make it seem as if there would be cuts in Medicare that would compromise patient care. There was talk of death panels. The cost saving measures in Medicare intended to cover some of the costs of health care for others were difficult to understand. Moreover, Democrats did not do a good job explaining and defending the Affordable Care Act during the campaign. They did not speak enough about the provision for preventive care for seniors. I say again: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Medicare was the pit Republicans dug to win in 2010, and it will be the pit they fall into in 2012.

For bibliophiles, people who love books, who love the shape, texture and weight of them, holy ground is found at the library and at the bookstore. I confess that for me, these places are sanctuaries. They are a refuge that calls to me and invites me to come when life gets just too crazy stupid for words. The paradox is that I go to the places that are filled with books. I run toward the words. The biographies, histories, philosophies put whatever I am going through in perspective. And when I found myself at the Borders, I also could find comfort in the new music that I would bring home to become a part of my life’s soundtrack.

Today I bit the bullet and visited my local Borders Books and Music. I was sad when I heard the news that Borders was closing all of its stores. I had not finished my grieving process for the Borders in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. My daughter told me that it did not survive the first round of cuts. It was a place I took my children when they were still children. While writing my dissertation, it was a place where I went to find yet another book by Jacques Derrida hoping that this new one would explain the one I was currently reading. After I moved away from Philadelphia, whenever I was back in town, I would go there to shop for books and to eat carrot cake at a table near the window while I watched the people passing by on Germantown Ave.

However, the visit to my local Borders was even sadder than I thought it would be. There is something shabby about going out of business sales. The place is undone. The signs of the 25% to 50% off are ugly. The yellow is too yellow, the black too black. The lettering is too bold. All sales final is too final.

At the start of the 112^th Congress, with Republicans in the majority in the House of Representatives, members of the House read the Constitution of the United States out loud. The Republicans declared that every bill passed by the House ought to have a constitutional justification. They wanted to use the Constitution to proof text their work. Time has passed. And, here we are six-months into this Congress, standing at the brink of default on our national debt, and apparently the Republicans in the House have forgotten their constitutional responsibilities. Either that or they want to evade them.

According to the Constitution, the Congress has the power to raise revenues. It says: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” (Article I: Section 7) The President of the United States has veto power over the legislation. Congress can override his veto with a two-third vote of both House and Senate.

The Constitution says further: “The Congress shall have power: To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States. . . To borrow money on the credit of the United States. . . ” (Article 1 Section 8)

With power comes responsibility. Congress is responsible for raising the debt limit. If the nation defaults, the people ought to hold Congress accountable. Some Republican Congress members have complained that President Obama has not publically stated, in writing, what specific combination of budget cuts and tax revenues he would support. Representative Diane Black (R-Tenn.), after a June 2^nd meeting between freshmen Republicans and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, said she intended to write a letter to President Obama requesting a specific plan that could be scored by the Congressional Budget Office.(http://majorityleader.gov/blog/2011/06/gop-freshmen-call-for-specifics-reject-wh-call-for-tax-hikes.html)

It is the 4^th of July, and I am taking a moment before I go outside and fire up the grill and before I start boiling the potatoes for potato salad. This is a holy day of the American Civil Religion when we light fires and offer hopefully not so burnt offerings to the gods of the nation – our Creator, Nature and Nature’s God, the Supreme Judge of the world, Divine Providence. Some of us will picnic, go to concerts and/or firework displays to celebrate the birth of our nation. Some of us will cook our summer food and feast with family and friends. However, this is also a day to pause for a moment to consider the meaning of our Declaration of Independence and the nation that it brought to birth.

I have always loved the Declaration as a piece of fine writing. The words, the ideas were so much larger than Thomas Jefferson and the men who edited it and who approved it. There is a reason that it has been a touchstone of revolutions, a template of human rights from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 18^th century France to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 20^th century world. It has been a continual inspiration for people in the United States who struggle for their own human dignity from women at Seneca Falls, New York to the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, to the radical humanism of Malcolm X and of the Black Panther Party to the new American Dream Movement. Its international children include the young people of Tiananmen Square in China to Tahrir Square in Egypt. The revolutions that partake of its spirit are colored orange and green and jasmine. Its textures are velvet and its sensibilities are poetic. The celebration of the 4^th of July and of the Declaration of Independence is larger than the celebration of the birth of one nation.

The gospel is the good news. We need a little good news right this very minute. So much of the news has been discouragingly awful. Unemployment remains unacceptably high. A strange new bacterium is making people sick. Deadly tornadoes are tearing across the nation. Congress still cannot get its act together. Gas prices are high. Home prices are low. The Arab spring is turning into a violent summer. There is still a stalemate in Israel/Palestine. What is a person to do?

Be still and know that God is God. Be still and know that God is Love, and through it all, God’s perfect unconditional radical love will hold us through the storm. And know that this too shall pass. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6olU1D70eys) This is the gospel that we need at this moment, not only in our personal lives, but in our national and global relationships.

­The Garden and the Bird Bath­

We were late putting in the garden this year. There has been so much rain in the St. Louis area. But, we got it in last week. We planted tomatoes, both red and green bell peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, Swiss chard, mustards, turnips, cantaloupe, basil, sweet mint, rosemary, thyme, oregano and parsley. I also planted African marigolds. I have heard that they may keep the insects and the critters out of the garden. This year we planted in boxes. This will keep me from getting blisters on my hands from hoeing rows, trying to fight back the weeds.

So far it is working well. I go out every morning before it gets too hot and I pull the weeds. My 83-year-old father calls it Bermuda grass. I do not know if that is its true name or not. I do know that it has long skinny tough roots that not only go down but to the sides. I have rarely pulled one up entirely from the root. I pull until it breaks. It is a tough little plant. If only the plants I want to grow were as quick to grow and to plants its roots deep into the earth.

I am the mother you ought to fear.

I am the mother you ought to regard with awe and wonder.

I am not any of the Mother Gods you think you know. I am not the triune female divine – virgin, mother, crone. I am not the Madonna tenderly caring for her infant child. I am not Mary of the Pieta holding the crucified body of her sacrificed son. I am not Ala, Mami, Gaia or Kali. I am not Woman Wisdom of the biblical book of Proverbs. I am the nameless mother who is the mother of all the elements that come together to make life possible. I am also the mother of all that comes together to destroy every material thing you value.

I am the mother of volcano, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, cyclone, tornado, blizzard, fire and flood. I breathe heat and bring drought. And my message to you this Mother’s Day is stop with the nonsense.

I try not to write when I am angry.

Today, I am going to break this rule.

This morning (April 17, 2011), President Obama released the long form of his birth certificate. He did it because the public discourse on whether or not he was born in the United States had started to take up too much time and space. He no doubt also did it because polls show that some 45 percent of Republicans think that his citizenship is questionable. Franklin Graham, whose credibility in my eyes has been increasingly on the decline because of his comments on Islam, said recently that he had doubts about the president’s birth and about his Christianity.

Some people question why the president did not release his birth certificate earlier. My question is why ought he have had to do it at all? What other president of the United States has had to produce a birth certificate? What is the source of such a double standard? The answer: madness. Birther madness. Such madness takes us back to what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the congenital deformity of the United States of America: the contradiction of a nation born in and through the rhetoric and political philosophy of human equality and inalienable rights that is also a slave-holding society.

An icon is an image, a representation of a sacred person that itself becomes sacred. A living breathing human being becomes an icon when she represents some aspects of the human condition that once we see them, helps us to better understand ourselves. Such knowledge allows us to live life knowing that we are not alone in our joys, passions, loves, grieves and struggles to leave some small mark on the world. The icon becomes sacred because the humanity she represents is sacred.

Elizabeth Taylor was and is such an icon. The stunningly beautiful actor and humanitarian died March 23, 2011, age 79. However, she will live as long as her motion pictures live. She will live as long as the history of HIV-AIDS is told. She will live in the lives of every woman, every human being who finds herself/ himself, winding through life’s labyrinth of triumph and defeat, of adoration and abuse, of acceptance and ridicule, of fame and shame, of love and loss.

Yet, there was an ordinariness about this extraordinary woman. She was married eight times to seven different men. She married Richard Burton twice. No judgment.

When I see the crowds protesting against laws that would strip the collective bargaining rights of government employees, I see an apt comparison to the crowds protesting for freedom across the Middle East. Some observers – Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and New York Times columnist David Brooks among them – think that the comparison goes too far. On Meet the Press, Sunday February 27, David Gregory wanted his guests who supported the protesters to denounce the signs that compared Governor Walker to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler. I agree that we ought to just leave Hitler to history, but in many ways the comparison to Mubarak is not incorrect.

It is true that the people of Wisconsin and of the other states protesting similar legislation are not ruled by an autocrat who has held power for thirty years. It is true that they are free to peacefully assemble without worry of police brutality. It is true that their complaint is with governors who have been elected recently. The similarity that I see is that people are taking to the street both in the Middle East and in the Mid-West in the United States for the sake of winning and of keeping their human rights. And human rights are not ends in themselves; rather they are means to an end. The end is a better quality of life.

Universal human rights are pesky ideas. They show up wherever and whenever human beings take a hard look at their lives compared to those around them and perceive injustice. They show up in distant foreign capitals. They show up in our own home towns and states. We applaud our sisters and brothers in distant lands standing up for their human rights, and we ought to applaud the government workers in Wisconsin who are standing up for their human rights.

The United States is a plutocracy wearing the garments of a democracy. We have elections. We have a strong civil society. We take the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion for granted. However, our government is run by the rich for the rich. Fiscal and monetary policy are made by legislators and appointed officials whose primary concern is pleasing the people who finance their election campaigns. Their policies serve the rich, and they make either/or arguments to persuade the demos, the ordinary people.

Such is the case in Wisconsin. The governor says that he needs public employees to pay more for benefits such as health care and pensions. Beyond this, he wants to take away the right to collective bargaining for anything other than wages from certain state employees. He argues that the fiscal problems of the state demand such sacrifice or the state will fall into a financial abyss that will jeopardize the living standards of generations to come. At the same time, the governor and the Republican controlled legislature have passed tax cuts. The argument is that these tax cuts will attract businesses into the state and create jobs.