“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8)The shepherds make for a nice presence, don’t they, both in Luke’s nativity and more recently in countless nativity pageants the world over. In Luke’s version of the nativity story, the shepherds are the first to receive the good news of Jesus’ birth.

The shepherds matter to my understanding of Jesus – of Yeshua ben Miriam – because of where they stood in the social hierarchy of their day. So who were the shepherds? Peasants at best, and therefore marginal figures. There is some possibility they even belonged to the outcast class, according to writings from after Luke’s time. They were not people with power or status. Who would they be in our time? Poor kids who are lucky to get fast food jobs, maybe. If they really were outcasts, perhaps undocumented immigrants. We have plenty of shepherds today. And we know who they are.

What would constitute “good tidings of great joy” (luke 2:10) for the shepherds of Judea, circa 4 BCE? Maybe the announcement of a particular birth: the birth of a man who would, as an adult, go into the synagogue and say that God had anointed him to bring good news to the poor. And especially in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus had a lot of good news for the poor. He said they were blessed. He said the Kingdom of God was theirs. He ate with them and healed them and invited them to walk with him along the way. What an incredible experience that would have been, to be a marginal figure in society and suddenly to find oneself in relationship with a God-intoxicated prophet and teacher.

Why is it so hard to be grateful?

In the churches of my childhood, the ministers would intone, “Let us give thanks,” perhaps after the collection plate had been passed, and we would all bow our heads and go through the motions. I don’t remember feeling actual gratitude.

But that wasn’t for lack of reminding. A hymn too exhorted us, “Count your Blessings. Name them one by one, and you’ll be surprised at what the Lord has done.” I do not recall ever literally counting my blessings or being surprised, except in a bad way, at what the Lord had done. Being the pious kind of person who read the Bible from cover to cover on summer vacation, I must have gone through the exercise, in prayers on my knees, but I do not recall feeling grateful. Maybe I thought my blessings wouldn’t add up to much, or maybe I didn’t know how to be grateful. Gratitude was hard to muster; however, sardonic and sarcastic responses arose with great ease.

Isn’t gratitude just happy talk, denial, and bullshit? Isn’t it masochism?

I had the opportunity the other night to present Seminary of the Street and our West Oakland Reconciliation and Social Healing Project to a local West Oakland Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council (NCPC). It didn’t go particularly well, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out exactly why and what I could have done differently.

I realize now that the whole framework of crime prevention as it is currently conceived is a framework of preserving and protecting me and mine—my life, my family, my house, my stuff, and in the best instances, my community, understood as the people I know and care about in the neighborhood. The good guys. There’s nothing surprising or unusual about this goal. It’s the predominant goal toward which we are taught in this culture to orient our lives.

But it’s very different from the goal of “loving God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and loving your neighbor as yourself.”

Antiracist Rally, Sydney, 2005 (no attribution)

I’ve been reflecting on Theodore Parker recently, the 19^th century Unitarian minister who came to his social justice work (abolition in particular) through his liberal Christian beliefs. Since 2010 is Parker’s 200^th birthday, it’s not a bad time to think about him or the work he did. But there’s another reason Parker is on my mind, which is that it is just as possible to come to spirituality through social action as it is to come to social action through spirituality. And here, I am thinking about the spirituality of ally work.

Ally work can range from donating money, to moving into a neighborhood where your presence will support people in need, to leading workshops for other potential allies to practice daily the art of interrupting violent comments and demeaning jokes. There are many ways to be a good ally, some of them noted by Tim Wise, Paul Kivel, Allan Johnson, Meredith Maran, and others. All it takes is a serious commitment to the dignity, well-being, and empowerment of those in a social group to which you don’t belong, those who suffer from a form of inequality in which you are on the privileged end of things.

Ally work is important because all hands are needed on deck to heal the world. But ally work can have an important “side effect” if we let it: it can become a form of spiritual discipline as profound as prayer or meditation. Here are three spiritual elements of ally work that I have experienced:

Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting the integration of Central High School.

In April, I was riding the DC Metro to the Capitol Mall, when several Tea Party demonstrators got on and sat a few seats away from me. The first, a young white man, wore red-and-white striped shoes with blue tops and other Uncle Sam garb; the young, white woman with him carried a hand-made sign on which was glued an old document titled “The Constitution” and the words, “Miss me yet?”

Their origins, judging by hair, clothes, accent, and where they got on seemed to be lower middle class church goers. Not rich. Not sophisticates. And not stupid. I wanted to ask the woman, “Which part of the Constitution do you see as lost?” Had she read it all the way through?

Who Are These People?

Who dresses up in red, white, and blue costumes, demonstrates, and now, votes for astonishingly extremist candidates in New York and Delaware? What motivates them?

We hear from investigative reports that the Tea Party is, by and large, a middle class group, including ironically people with jobs in the Department of Defense (never a waste of tax dollars), and nourished behind the scenes by wealthy conservatives like Dick Cheney and his daughter, but it has spread. Looking at those two, I caught a glimpse of a world they probably longed for, a world I grew up in, a place that we, as a country, have been before.

by John Dear

“Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare.” That’s how one Las Vegas newspaper summed up our stunning day in court last Tuesday, when fourteen of us stood trial for walking on to Creech Air Force Base last year on April 9, 2009 to protest the U.S. drones.

We went in hoping for the best and prepared for the worst. As soon as we started, the judge announced that he would not allow any testimony on international law, the necessity defense or the drones, only what pertained to the charge of “criminal trespassing.”

With that, the prosecutors called forth a base commander and a local police chief to testify that we had entered the base, that they had given us warnings to leave, and that they arrested us. They testified that they remembered each one of us. Then they rested their case.

We called three expert witnesses, what the newspaper called “some of the biggest names in the modern anti-war movement:” Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and one of three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and Bill Quigley, legal director for the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights. We presumed they would not be allowed to speak.
All fourteen of us acted as our own lawyers, and were not allowed any legal assistance, so members of our group took turns questioning our witnesses, and trying not to draw the judge’s wrath. Lo and behold, the judge let them speak, and they spoke for hours.

In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.”

Feel free to check out the first two installments if you are so moved:
Morning Feature: Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and “The Left”
Furthermore! Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks: From Tolerance to Empathy

Glenn Beck supporters gather for his "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall on August 28, 2010. Photo courtesy of FlickrCC/theqspeaks.

As one who has been vilified by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, I had to tune in Saturday and listen to his speech in Washington, D.C. (almost as one who cannot help but to look at a car accident as they drive by on the freeway). During his “revival,” Beck gave his usual banter regarding the beauties of Capitalism and runaway consumerism, the dangers of anything with the word “social” in it, and how we should fear the coming financial apocalypse by “battening down the hatches” and “get everything you can while the getting’s good.”

However, it was not his usual verbosity that gave me pause — that caused me to be in “shock and awe,” if you will. It was his statement on civil rights:

We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights. Equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice, but equal justice.

Equal justice? Standing up for Civil Rights? How can Glenn Beck — a man who makes millions of dollars as a purveyor of fear and, in a McCarthy-esque fashion, labeling those who disagree with his point-of-view (including us progressives) as “Marxists” and “Nazis” — even begin to talk about equality or justice while there still exists the poor, the homeless, the falsely accused, and the disenfranchised within our own backyard (much less the world)?

Sometimes the work of trying to bring justice to a world that seems so broken feels like a battle that can never be won. But every once in a while, something happens that reminds you that you must keep working for justice. This week, the family and friends of a little girl named Abir, and the many many many other people who have struggled to seek justice after she was killed, got a boost of hope. An Israeli judge issued an incredible ruling, and my friends at the Rebuilding Alliance wanted to share the news with the world. They’ve been working to not only get justice in this case, but to also build hope for Abir’s community, by building playgrounds in her memory.

Many years ago, when I was struggling to understand the smoke-and-mirrors world of corporate journalism, a Washington, D.C., veteran passed on to me a bit of wisdom:

When I was a reporter, an old PR pro once told me something. He said ‘You come to the press conferences and you listen, and the first mistake you make is that you think we’re lying. You discover we’re not lying. Then you make a greater mistake. You think we’re telling the truth.’ (1)

In Part I of examining the Catholic Crisis, I tried to point out the problem with this greater mistake. We examined the falsity within the partial truths of the meta-stories in pop culture, these simplistic, black-and-white constructs that make the world safe and understandable. We picked apart the assumptions blended with facts in one of last week’s news story that made it seem the Vatican thinks the ordaining of women is as bad as priests who sexually abuse children.

Now, we turn to a more difficult side of the partial truth: the way in which it is true. The truth within the partial truth poses a challenge to human understanding, because it is so difficult to face that our mind wants nothing more than to jump to quick and easy explanations, to construct meta-stories of some kind. But if we do this, we avoid the paradox that can, with struggle, force us to mature.

Last Thursday July 15th Fran Luck interviewed Abby Scher and me about right-wing “feminism.” I wrote about it after our talk, and I just wanted you to know that you can hear us at http://archive.wbai.org. Just scroll down the page until you come to the “Joy of Resistance” on Thursday July 15 at 11:00am (the listing is in reverse chronological order). The first half of the show concerns current news about women around the world, and the interview begins at 31:17 (i.e. 31 minutes and 17 seconds into the program). Hope you enjoy it.

Having infuriated Democrats with her astonishing loss of Ted Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat to a suburban truck-drivin’ pin-up populist, Martha Coakley is back. But this time she’s racking up a series of impressive legal victories for liberals. She has won a $102 million dollar settlement against Morgan Stanley, taken on insurance companies for paying hospitals based on political clout rather than quality, and successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Athough unchallenged by the GOP in her November race for Attorney General, Coakley is campaigning vigorously. Could she be positioning herself to recapture the MA Senate seat from Scott Brown for the Dems? Is this the real Martha Coakley? Or both?

NWP members picket the White House in 1917. The banner reads, "Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty."

This morning I had the pleasure of talking with Fran Luck on WBAI-FM , a Pacifica affiliate in NYC. Fran hosts the “Joy of Resistance,” a show that covers “the ongoing and world-wide struggle for the full liberation of women–as it continues to unfold dynamically in every country and culture on the planet.” She had read my original post about Sarah Palin and wanted to interview me about the parallels I saw between Palin’s “feminism” and the Nazi militants, about whom I wrote part of my dissertation. It was a great conversation.

I’m a conversation junkie. Nothing gets my mind going like talking with a knowledgeable person. That’s part of the reason I love Tikkun Daily. I interact with smart, informed folks who are just as interested as I am in the topics I write about.

Fran’s interest in my post was piqued by the fact that a group of women calling themselves “feminist” existed during the Third Reich. She brought Abby Scher into our discussion, because Abby has been researching women on the American Right for quite a while and edits “The Public Eye,” a quarterly publication that tracks right-wing movements.

Three years ago, Sen. Barack Obama was sharp, forceful and eloquent in his questions to Gen. David Petraeus about the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a congressional hearing on Iraq, Obama did not mince words with the general:

This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. And we are now confronted with the question: How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in which there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?

Sen. Barack Obama questions Gen. Petraeus during Iraq hearings, 2007. (Go to 3:00 of this 9:45 minute video for above quote.)

This same candidate Obama was also confidently talking about withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months during his 2007 interviews. He defended a pull-out to two New York Times reporters, saying it would not “backfire” and discourage the Iraqis to find a political solution involving all sides of the conflict, as the critics claimed.

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.

“Hey, look at this!” I shouted to my husband, early one morning a few weeks ago. “Ian’s on the front page of the Huffington Post!”

Ian is my oldest brother. According to family lore, he went to school in France as an exchange student at 16. He then entered Friends World College where, after listing his interests as French, totalitarian government and oceanography, he was dispatched to Haiti on a fishing boat. He earned graduate degrees in oceanography in Oslo, Norway and then spent an indeterminate amount of time building fish hatcheries throughout the third world, traveling, or both. He is fluent in English, Creole, French, northern and southern Norwegian and Italian. Eventually, he became an expert in the impacts of oil on Gulf ecosystems.

“He says BP is lying about the size of the spill,” I said as Richard brought me my coffee.

Code Pink protests John Yoo at the Commonwealth Club. Photo: Steve Rhodes/flickr

The long line of UC law school graduates approached the protest with some hesitation.

Crossing from the opposite side of Gayley Avenue on the northern edge of UC’s campus, the professors in their colorful medieval robes were the first to see the photos, the orange suited inmate, the leaflets against torture. Then some 250 students followed in their black caps and gowns, streaming toward the Greek Theater for their graduation ceremonies.

They saw once again the unforgettable images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. A color photograph of a naked young man with a black hood stretched to a metal bed frame, a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling and in chains. And they filed past a dozen of us handing out pamphlets and orange ribbons to protest American torture policies.

These photos show war crimes. They show people seized without any process of law, held in arbitrary detention and subjected to agonizing suffering. For what? For the false confessions, inaccurate information and wild allegations that have become a staple during the “war on terror.” Some day, I’m convinced they will convict Bush administration officials, such as UC law professor John Yoo, of war crimes.

When I joined these protests four years ago, organized by the Bush impeachment group, the World Can’t Wait, we seemed pitifully few in number. Maybe six or eight of us gathered outside of Boalt Hall on the busy Bancroft Avenue. Few of the passers-by took the leaflets. We often addressed our arguments loudly and persuasively – to ourselves. It was easy to feel irrelevant and marginal. Behind us, with its imposing stone façade, Boalt Hall seemed an impressive, almost impregnable institution.

At last Pope Benedict XVI is moving the Catholic Church toward the truth: the victims need justice and the Church needs transformation. In this, he shows the human struggle for and against change — and the path of renewal ahead.

Last Easter, the Roman Catholic Church, my beloved church, seemed to retreat into a shell of institutional defensiveness. Some of the top clerics absurdly complained of an anti-Catholic backlash similar to “anti-Semitism” when, in fact, it was facing the cry for justice among the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests for decades.

But when you love someone, or some community, you see the greatness that lies within the heart. Every parent knows what the faith of love is like. You weep with grief over the child’s destructive behavior, but you never think these actions are the final verdict of the child’s nature. With the eyes of love, you see that your child’s destructive actions are only mistaken aberrations and that his or her inner goodness always remains the truer self.

Pope Benedict XVI during his arrival in the Lisbon airport on May 11, 2010. Credit: M.Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk.

That’s why I castigated the Church for its self-pity — a dominant Euro-centric organization of 1 billion members is not a very convincing candidate for victimhood — but also explained why I have faith in the Catholic Church. Back in April I wrote:

It is precisely at the moment of moral challenge, whether from the suffering of the sexually abused or the victims of anti-Jewish genocide, that the Catholic Church has the opportunity to show its true self. It has the powerful spiritual tools of prayer and Gospel values for uncovering the roots of the errors of the past and making the necessary changes.

It is my faith and conviction that this will – and must – happen. This is why the sturm und drang of the moment does not disillusion me. The best in the Catholic tradition reflects a pilgrim Church on the journey of growth and change.

Now it is time to acknowledge, and celebrate, that the best in the Church is emerging, at least for the moment. It is taking responsibility for its own sins, recognizing the attacks from the world are justified and that the Church needs to change.

When it comes to establishing a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine, should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Does a “good” peace even satisfy minimum human rights requirements? Can and should we negotiate with regimes with despicable human rights records in order to ensure regional peace in the Middle East? I take up these questions–some explicitly, others implied–in what follows, where I call for the Obama Administration to engage in a sustained diplomatic push with Syria and Israel in order to create the conditions for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli-Arab conflict has inflamed the Middle East for half a century, and negotiations aimed towards the creation of a Palestinian state have stalled. While we should encourage Israel and the Palestinian National Authority to fulfill their obligations stipulated at the Annapolis Conference, current political and security conditions within both Israel and the Palestinian Territories are not conducive to reaching a final settlement.

This is partly due to domestic politics within both territories. In Israel, powerful far-right pro-settler parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government will seek to stymie any two-state solution, and Netanyahu’s own commitment to a two-state solution appears tenuous. Furthermore, security fears about Iran’s burgeoning regional power are widespread, causing Israel to reorient its foreign policy away from solving the Palestinian question and towards containing Iran.

One of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandsons, and his recent biographer, visits the West Bank:

Dr Mustafa Barghouthi gave Prof Rajmohan Gandhi a tour of the West Bank city of Hebron. (Photo: Lazar Simeonov)

‘The range of Palestinian non-violent activity against occupation,’ said Prof Gandhi, is also ‘larger, and richer in creativity, than I had imagined. The work being done by Palestinians for strengthening civil society – through educational and public health programs – is also much stronger than I had realized. ‘Many Palestinians I have met seem to hold both weapons in their hands – in one hand the weapon of non-violent resistance and in the other the weapon of constructive work.’

Then on to Israel. “The recovery after the Holocaust of the Jewish people,” Prof. Gandhi told the Israeli President Shimon Peres, “is one of the noblest, most stirring chapters in the story of humankind. I pray for another chapter in this story, a chapter where justice is provided to the Palestinians.”