Quo Vadimus

2009-04-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

Maundy Thursday 2009,
Christ Church Cathedral
St. Louis, Missouri
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

I’m a baseball nut, and one of my all-time favorite movies is Bull Durham. How many of you have seen it? OK, for those who haven’t, let me tell you a bit about it. On the surface, it seems like just a movie about minor league baseball, but really it’s about two people who are at crossroads in their life, who feel that everything that has been familiar to them and has given meaning to their lives is either slipping away or is about to be taken from them. It’s about two people who are at that time in life when you stop feeling like you’re going to live forever and you start realizing the phrase “the rest of your life” has a clock ticking inside it.

On one hand, there’s Crash Davis. Crash is a longtime minor league catcher, and baseball is his life. It’s all he’s ever known, he can’t imagine life outside it, and for as long as he can remember his dream was to play in the major leagues. And one year for 21 days … the 21 greatest days of his life … he was there. But now he’s reaching the end of the road and he finds himself not at the top – in the majors – but at the bottom, with the Durham Bulls of the Carolina League. And the only reason he even has that job isn’t because the major league club thinks he has a future, but because they think he can help the future of someone else, some new hotshot pitcher.

On the other hand, there’s Annie Savoy. Annie has always been a free spirit. She teaches at the local community college, but mostly she’s a fulltime life-long spiritual seeker who latched onto what she calls the "Church of Baseball" as one of many philosophies she has embraced and whose maxims she can spout as a way of making meaning from her life and keeping control of it. And every year, Annie chooses a player on the Bulls to be her lover/student. To “give him life wisdom and help him on his way” is how she puts it. But she’s careful never to let anyone get too close. But as the years have passed, this “religious practice” has seemed more and more empty. The meaning isn’t there any more. And she feels like she’s losing control.

What Crash and Annie don’t want to admit to anyone, much less themselves, is that they’re scared. They’re not young anymore, and remaking themselves doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun and they have no idea how they’d do it even if it did! Each in their own way, they’ve spent their whole lives keeping other people from getting too close, and while that’s helped them keep control, it’s left them facing these crossroads alone. Until…

They find each other. And at first they fight because they’re so much alike and on one level that makes them so scared of each other. But then they fall in love. And the struggle of Crash and Annie’s love is that of two proud people letting down their guards and not just admitting that they need each other but inviting the other into that space inside where they have been living alone for so many years. And when they finally do it, when they finally let down their guards and put themselves out there and let each other in and embrace each other, man it is a seismic event. The richness of the lives, the dreams, the pains, the joys that come together as Crash and Annie, well, crash into each other, man it just flows off the screen.

But where the quake really leaps off the Richter scale, where the intensity of the intimacy reaches its peak, is not in some x-rated scene that’s only on the DVD versions, but a shot of what can’t be more than 15 seconds in Annie’s bedroom, where Crash is sitting on Annie’s bed, gently holding her foot in his lap and with a loving, even slightly impish smile on his face, painting her toenails.

About 10 years ago, Harlequin asked movie critics to pick the top 10 all-time most romantic bedroom scenes, and right there on the list, right up there with the steam of Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in Body Heat, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest and even the sultry morning after of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind was Kevin Costner as Crash Davis gently, tenderly, intimately, joyfully, painting Susan Sarandon as Annie Savoy’s toenails.

There’s something about the feet.

“Then Jesus poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head.”

This night we do something we do no other night of the year. We wash each other’s feet. On one level, we do it for a pretty simple reason … because Jesus set an example and told us to follow it. The Gospel reading makes that clear enough. And, usually, we primarily see it as an act of service, and yeah, sure, it is. But it is so much more than that.

I’m not sure why, but there’s something about the feet. They’re intimate and private. That’s why that scene with Crash and Annie is so powerful and that’s why this night is so powerful, too. I really don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s because for most of us our feet bear the weight of our lives. You don’t just let anyone give you a foot massage … and I’ve had a pedicurist tell me that their job often is more like a bartender than anything else, they spend so much time listening to people’s problems.

Washing feet is not just about an unpleasant, humbling task and it’s certainly not just about podiatric hygiene. It’s about letting what happened between Crash and Annie happen among us. About letting our guards down and letting each other into our lives in an intimate way. It is literally putting ourselves, the weight of our lives, in each others’ hands. That’s why Jesus said to Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” It’s not about washing feet. It’s about saying “Unless you let your guard down, let go of your fear, let go of everything and let me in, you can’t experience who I am and what I bring.”

And it’s no accident that Jesus does this immediately after his last supper with his friends, the moment of the first Eucharist. Because both the Eucharist and the footwashing are different ways of saying the same thing. It was like Jesus, after sharing the meal said, “Let me put it another way” and began to fill the basin. Because the Eucharist is also about experiencing everything Christ is and all Christ gives by letting go and letting each other and Christ in.

Think of what happens when we gather at this table. We come forward and gather round and present our gifts --- sure, the bread and the wine and the money we offer --- but those are mere signs of something greater, what the Rite I service expresses in those beautiful words, “we offer and present unto you, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.” That’s not about holding back and giving a little. That’s about taking all of us, the parts we usually show and especially the parts we don’t … and laying it right there on the table. And two things happen at that point.

The first is that Christ, whose life is on that table, too, sees our lives, embraces our lives and tenderly lifts them up, all our tragedies and triumphs. All our wholeness and brokenness. All our pain and all our joy. All our Crashness and all our Annieness and wraps them up with his and calls it holy and gives it back to us new.

But the second is that if we are really to enter into the Eucharist. If we are really to have a share in Christ together, it can’t be just about “me and Jesus.” And so when we gather around that table and lay our lives, “our selves, our souls and bodies,” tragedy, triumph, wholeness, brokenness, pain, joy, Crashness and Annieness on the table, if we’re doing it right, Jesus ain’t the only one who sees it … we all see it, too. I see yours and you see mine and we all see each others’. And then as we leave the table fed with new life, we have the opportunity truly to be the Body of Christ. Because having gazed on the holy chaos of each others lives, we can take each others’ lives gently into our laps and cleanse them, kiss them, even paint their toenails … but mostly just be with them. See each other for who we really are, and just BE with each other.

That means the Eucharist is more than just a personal filling station … though it can certainly be that, too. It means the Eucharist is nothing less than a vision of God's future. We heard in the Epistle reading a few minutes ago the first record we have of the church’s Eucharistic practice. But we really started the reading a few verses too late. If you go back and read it from verse 17, Paul talks about how as the Corinthians gather for the meal, each one needs to be willing to give precedence to the other. Everyone should be waiting on everyone else, attending to the lives of others.

A few years back, I heard Rowan Williams talk about this passage from Corinthians and our need to have peripheral vision when we come to the Eucharistic table.

He said: “When we come to the Eucharistic table, the needs of the neighbor come first. We must look sideways as well as forward, and as we see others fed we ask, 'How may I be part of Christ's feeding of them?' Because the first thing -- and sometimes the only thing -- you know of the person next to you at Eucharist is that they are Christ's guest. It is imperative to ask, 'How may I join in Christ's nourishment of them?'"

That’s about not just coming to Eucharist but living Eucharistically. And what we do here tonight, both in washing one another’s feet and sharing our lives and Christ’s at this table, is a sign of that Eucharistic life, of God’s future for this world and for this Cathedral community. A future where we aren’t just looking forward but also always looking sideways. And it is a glorious future.

It’s a future where we don’t need to hide who we are, where we don’t need to closet the parts of our lives we think others might disapprove of or not understand. Where we can share our joys and triumphs without worrying about offending and share our pain and fear without worrying about rejection. Why? Because we know the person next to us at this table is looking not to ridicule us but to be a part of Christ nourishing us too. A future where each of us can look sideways and ask that wonderful question. And like Crash and Annie, find that it is in caring for the other, being a part of Christ nourishing the other, that we find meaning, deep joy, and even love for ourselves.

And as we find that, we will naturally, enthusiastically and maybe even contagiously realize that this is WAY too good to be kept to ourselves. And we will go out into the streets and our schools and our workplaces and tell people of this new life we’ve found and we’ll bring them to the table, too. We will be the blood of Christ and Christ at this table will be the heart, drawing us to it and pumping us out and drawing us to it and pumping us out.

It is our future. And it is out there waiting for us. And there have been places in this community where that future has already been and even now is being realized. Where friendships of 30 years or 30 days give an abundance of life. Where prayer groups have sustained and even brought joy where there was nothing but pain because people have had the courage to let down their guards and actually tell people what they need prayer for. Where lecturing and debate has given way to listening and conversation. Where we have reached out in love and not fallen back in fear.

It is our future. A future that grows out of the best of our present and past. And it begins here at this table, and here at these chairs. With you and you. And me and you. And you and you. And you and you! And you, bishop, and me! Washing each other’s feet and feeding each other’s hearts. Always having that peripheral vision and asking the question as we see one another “How may I join in Christ’s nourishment of them.”

It begins like Crash and Annie, with us letting down our guards and letting each other in and discovering the joy of the embrace. It might be scary at first, but we’ll get the hang of it. And as we do it will be a seismic event that will send waves of love from this place to, well, who knows how far. And by this everyone will know that we are Christ’s disciples, because we truly will have love for one another.

Amen.

2008-12-05T14:50:00.004-06:00

Help our sister Heather!

Many of you know Heather Voss Barta . She and her husband live in Owosso, MI and last Friday night a fire totaled their garage is totaled - to a crisp (2 cars and a motorcycle, too).

The fire then jumped and caught the house on fire - one side is pretty fried... kitchen and dining room have wall and lots of water/wet insulation damage.

No injuries -- including pets, chickens, etc. ... but lots and lots of loss of property and the house is unliveable for the forseeable future. She has posted more on www.heathervoss.net so you can learn more there.

Heather is trying to frame this as best she can, but this is an incredibly difficult time for her and Henry. As most of us would be, she was initially resistant to me asking for help on her behalf, but I convinced her that part of being the Body of Christ is letting others be graceful to you in times of need.

So, we're going to do what we did last year for St. Peter's ...only this time it's the Voss Barta Relief Fund. You can click on the DONATE button to make your contribution!

I'm running it through my PayPal account and will make a complete accounting available to anyone upon request.

Let's rally around our sister. Even a $5 or $10 gift will be great -- and there isn't anyone on this list who can't click and do that. But if you can give a little more that would be great. Let's show Heather and Henry how we Christians love one another.

2008-07-25T10:37:00.001-05:00

Lambeth on the Colbert Report!

2008-02-08T15:39:00.000-06:00

The Audacity of Hope

I don't post much on this blog anymore ... at some point I will again, but now most of my work is being channeled into the EGR website (www.e4gr.org) and the EGR blog (www.e4gr.blogspot.com).

Occasionally, though, I will pop back and share something I have nowhere else to put ... not that I figure anybody's reading anymore.

You've probably heard that last night in a mostly-white suburb of St. Louis an African-American man who had longstanding conflicts with the city government came in and shot and killed a bunch of people.

I bring up the issue of race because even though this was obviously the terrible act of an incredibly unbalanced person, it -- and how it is being covered -- are a window into some of the terrible problems in our metropolitan area that are all about race and class.

I'm a big supporter of Barack Obama's and am on the St. Louis for Obama listserv. Earlier last week, someone posted on that list disputing someone else's claim that St. Louis was one of the most racially divided cities in America. Today, someone posted a rant about what had happened that showed absolutely no consciousness that extreme racial tensions exist in this city.

For any who are interested, below are my two responses to those respective emails. I'd be interested in any comments or discussion.

------

Over the past 20 years, St. Louis has consistently been in the top 10 on lists of the most segregated cities and metropolitan areas in the country. I remember a few years back we were at the top of the list (prompting a cover story in the Saturday P-D). I live in a somewhat diverse neighborhood, too ... but our neighborhoods are the exception rather than the rule.

I'm on jury duty (on a lunch break) and yesterday I was with a group going through voir dire, and one of the questions the prosecutor asked was whether we were likely to give a police officer more credence or less credence than another witness. Of those who didn't say "same" it was absolutely divided down racial lines -- with people of color saying they didn't trust the police and white people saying they gave them more credence.

When we were asked about we or our families being victims of violent crime, almost none of the white people in the room came forward while a substantial number of people of color raised their hands -- and most of them felt the police had done little or nothing to help them.. Ditto for having family members convicted of violent crimes ... and most of those who said they had family members convicted of violent crimes felt they had been screwed by the criminal justice system.

Now, you can have a legitimate debate about perception and reality in terms of whether people were actually screwed by the justice system, but this speaks to a huge racial divide in our city. Remember, this is a random sampling of St. Louis citizens.

One of the big hopes I have of the Obama campaign is that we will finally have a president who has the courage to take on the problems of our cities and not sugar-coat them.

-------------

Two days later, an African American man walks into the Kirkwood City Council Meeting and starts shooting.

--------------

Dear friends,

a few days back I wrote a post to this list about someone's objection to calling St. Louis a racially divided city. My point then was that both statistics and personal experience for those who have eyes to see bear out that we have serious racial problems in our city/metropolitan area.
This does not make St. Louis unique in America but St. Louis certainly is a tragically excellent example of what life is like in many urban areas across the country.

I would hope any rational person would agree that the shootings in Kirkwood last night were horrific and there is no defending them. I have not heard anyone on this list say otherwise.

But events like this rarely happen in a vacuum. One of the gifts John Edwards brought to this campaign was his lifting up of the reality that there are two Americas. There are. And there are certainly at least two St. Louises. There is the St. Louis in which I live where events like this still shock me. And there is the St. Louis that many poor, mostly African-American people live where shootings and violent crime are a normal part of life.

Shootings happen all the time in that "other" St. Louis. But the Today Show doesn't lead its broadcast with the shootings that happen in that "other" St. Louis. The St. Louis I live in doesn't wake up stunned and angry the way I and the other citizens of my St. Louis woke up this
morning. That's because it didn't happen in our St. Louis. We can agree it is tragic and "a shame" ... perhaps the same way we look at civilian casualties in Irak ... but it doesn't rock us to the core like this shooting. And that's to be expected. Because we live in two Americas, two St. Louises. And except for incidences like what happened last night, it's not really happening to "us".

What John Edwards lifted up and what I believe Barack Obama continues to lift up is a message of unity -- of there being one America, one St. Louis. That's not a pep rally, folks. That's hard work. That's those of us with the privilege of not living on streets where shootings and gunpoint robberies are an everyday occurrence putting ourselves out there in common cause with those for whom they are. That's about us being every bit as outraged at the elderly woman who was gunned down by stray bullet fire from a driveby in north St. Louis this month as we are
by the senseless death of the people in Kirkwood last night.

Yes, it's about us holding the people who do these things accountable. But it's also about recognizing that the Meacham Park neighborhood is in the state its in today not just because of its own actions but because of a long history of segregation and discrimination and that unity means TOGETHER we are going to have to look honestly at the past we have wrought and how we can walk TOGETHER on the hard road to a future we can embrace.

I was listening to talk radio this morning and someone was railing against the "idiots" in Meacham Park, showing a profound ignorance of the deep racial divide in our city and the deep pain and frustration of the people who live there. That's not about excusing the action, it's about
opening our eyes and ears and truly seeing what the world is like -- all of it.

My wife is a Hillary Clinton supporter. One of her beliefs about Barack Obama is that we who are supporting him have been captured by inspiring flowery rhetoric ... and that both the rhetoric and we who have been captivated by it lack substance behind it.

What happened last night is a tragedy, but it is also a moment of opportunity. I believe there is substance behind Barack Obama's message ... but it is a difficult and challenging substance. It is the substance of opening our eyes and honestly tackling our past and our future. It is the substance that goes beyond rhetoric and easy answers to the complexities of life in a stratified society where there are at least two Americas and St. Louises and Philadephias and more.

If we are really about the "Audacity of Hope" ... then that cannot just be a pie in the sky phrase. Because true hope comes not from ignoring the past and the present but honestly examining them -- especially the worst parts -- so together we can create a future that doesn't just look
good, but truly is good ... for everyone.

Are we up to that task?

2007-12-17T13:06:00.000-06:00

Give to the St. Peter's, Chicago "Tongues of Fire in Advent" Fund

Last Wednesday night, my Gen X Episcopal clergy colleague Sarah Fisher had a minor disaster at her church -- St. Peter's, Chicago. The advent wreath was not extinguished after the 6 PM eucharist ... and overnight it burned and melted what was the form, charred the rug (which the vestry had already voted to replace) and left significant smoke damage in the chapel. It is nothing short of a miracle that the chapel stands at all (and for that Sarah is definitely grateful). Whether the fire is the result of human error or a smoldering ember that nested inside the greens is anyone's guess and really beside the point.

It's been a rough time for St. Peter's, especially since this came on the heels of the death of one of the parish matriarchs.

It's just times like this that we show who we are as Christ's body ... and how we can come together in times of need.

St. Peter's isn't equipped to accept donations online, so I've set up a PayPal account to receive them for them. Between now and Christmas, let's see how much money we can raise to help St. Peter's pay for the smoke and fire damage (they haven't even calculated the bill yet). Even a $5 or $10 gift would be a wonderful thing.

Just click and give ... and help give this one church a tangible sense of what it means to be part of an Episcopal Church.

2007-10-04T13:33:00.000-05:00

The numbers game, all of our fundamentalisms and being unafraid

If you stay awake in the Episcopal Church long enough, the same conversations repeat themselves over and over ... and the causes of the numerical decline of the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations is one that's made the circuit several times.

Besides people of every theological/political bent succumbing to the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, which assumes that just because something preceded an event it caused that event (i.e. -- the church has declined since GenCon 2003 so that's what caused the decline), the debate is generally confined to finding "THE cause" for the decline. The world is much more complex than that (praise God!). And as much as we might not like to think so, individually and corporately we are all heavilly influenced by many societal factors. There is no ONE marker event cause for the decline. There are enormous global forces at work.

So given this ... a few not-so-brief thoughts and reflections:

Human beings want to control their environment. Chris Argyris at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has done some great research into the values that govern human behavior and the four major values that he has found cut across all cultures all have to do with either achieving control or at least maintaining the perception of control over our worlds.

We want reality to be predictable and controllable. We don't like feeling out of control, because that makes us feel powerless and believe that others will see us as powerless and insignificant, which in turn will make us even more powerless and insignificant (a pretty vicious circle). This is pretty basic -- systems of all sorts seek equilibrium. Chemical reactions will tend toward stability. Same thing with humans. So given a situation where things are out of control and chaotic, human nature is to try to establish control.

One way we establish control over our environment is to establish rules and absolutes. One way we do this in a chaotic universe is through the scientific method -- testing hypotheses to see which are trustworthy enough to make the transition from theory to fact -- things we can count on that allow us to predict (and control) reality.

As people of faith, we are no different. Part of what we love about God is the assurance the divine gives us. "Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus" is the height of comfort for me. I think and hope I believe it for reasons that go beyond that desire for comfort, but I also more quickly flock to that assurance during points in my life where I need that comfort, where I feel unloved or like all the rugs in the world are being pulled out from under me. As Christians, communally we take vows at baptism that give structure to our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. Those vows, and the scripture, tradition and reason from which they spring are a polestar for us that help us navigate the chaotic seas of life.

We live in an age where the pace of global change is faster than perhaps at any point in human history. Much of this has to do with increased global connectivity and that we are now face-to-face with the diversity of this planet in ways my grandfather never dreamed of.

A mere hundred years ago traveling to Africa was unheard of for all but the most adventurous Westerners. Last March, I sat in my friend's living room in Kigali, Rwanda and video-chatted with my wife and kids back in St. Louis on my laptop! As we become increasingly interconnected, the boundaries which once gave structure to our lives are becoming more permeable (or disappearing altogether!) and we are becoming truly a global community.

We see this perhaps most clearly in immigration and economic/trade patterns but also in the evolution of political structures. The nation-state, the primary locus of power for centuries, is rapidly taking a backseat to other confederations of people -- be they Al Qaeda for Microsoft or even Facebook and MySpace! Even the nation-state is not autonomous anymore, as more than $2 trillion of our national debt is owed to foreigners ... $1 trillion to Japan and China alone!

Much of this change has happened in the past 20 years -- the two watershed moments probably being the dawn of the internet age (which broke down geographic walls of global separation) and the fall of the Berlin Wall/end of the Cold War (which opened the world up economically and also for the first time -- in the West at least -- created a world without clear definition of who was "enemy," a core unifying principle for any society).

Going back further, the biggest marker event was 50 years ago today when Sputnik's beeps signalled the opening of a new frontier previously untraversed by humanity.

For most people whose formative years were before those watershed moments and for whom "home" is a place of relative isolation, safety and predictability (particularly those who were the "haves" and not the "have nots" oppressed under the old, predictable reality and for whom change is welcome!) these changes are incredibly challenging, stressful and anxiety producing. For those people, there will be a natural longing to go back to the way things were. For EVERYONE, there will be a natural longing to establish SOME sense of control over and predictability of reality.

History has shown us that periods of intense change inevitably bring about rise in fundamentalisms. Fundamentalism can be broadly defined as a single-minded devotion to a guiding principle or principles. There are fundamentalisms of all sorts -- not just the conservative right with whom the term is usually identified. This is also not just about having standards ... it's about living by absolutes that cannot be challenged -- to the extent that everything has to be black and white.

And it's all perfectly natural.

Because fundamentalism is all about establishing control or at least enough of an illusion of control to bring comfort and ease the stress and anxiety of the rapid pace of change. It's about taking the unpredictable and confusing grey and separating it out into black and white. That is what is happening in the world today. There is a rise of fundamentalism of all stripes, and it is a direct response to the rapid pace of change and how those things that we used to count on are becoming less and less trustworthy. We need to feel safe. We need to feel in control and powerful.

Fundamentalism gives us that control. It helps us know right from wrong, and even more, know that we are right and our enemies are wrong (and even gives us enemies over and against whom we can define ourselves).

It's very predictable and very human.

Does this mean that the "fundamentals" to which people are clinging are wrong? Not necessarily. It DOES mean that the reason people are clinging to them probably has a lot more to do with many, many other factors than whether they are right or wrong. Fundamentalism is attractive because it makes us feel powerful and right. That is completely apart from the truth of the "fundamental" in question. But we cannot determine the truth of any principle unless we are willing to test it. So we can't claim numbers of followers as proof that our particular fundamentalism is right or that "God is on our side!"

Fundamentalism is a natural reaction to a changing world. Because of that, and because the power of fundamentalism as a whole is completely apart from the question of truth of any "fundamentals" it is an external societal force that has us in its grip and prevents us from determining what Truth really is. And until we get in touch with and name the anxiety and fear that grips us. Until we acknoledge that a part of what makes any of our fundamentalisms attractive is the sense of power and control they give us -- and that's human nature and nothing of which to be ashamed. Until we can step out in faith away from that fear and anxiety, we will not be able to discern Truth because we will be too heavily invested in one answer to that question to give alternatives any possibility of emerging.

This is where our faith comes in. And this is where Christ, as always, is our best and truest model.

If there was ever a time in human history where an event happened that shook the foundations of everything people had thought was reality, it was the resurrection. People who died stayed dead. OK, there were a couple examples of Jesus disproving that ... but he had to be around to do the job! Now Jesus had died. They saw it. They laid him in the tomb. And then there he was appearing behind locked doors and having fish breakfasts with them. And what were his first words to them every time?

Don't be afraid.

Be at peace.

Jesus knew he was blowing their minds and rocking their worlds, that he was taking everything that had ever made their reality seem predictable and controllable and shattering it ... and he knew when that happened the natural human reaction was anxiety and fear. And he also knew that they couldn't enter into this new reality he was revealing to them ... they couldn't become resurrection people themselves ... if they were in the grip of that fear, if their actions were in reaction to that fear, if their need for control superceded their capacity for awe and wonder.

He needed to give them a safety zone where they could deal with this ... and that safety zone was his love and the promise "lo, I will be with you always until the end of the age."

In this time of intense, foundation-shaking, boundary-permeating change, Christ is standing in our midst still -- even when we have locked ourselves behind the doors of the "safe" realities our fundamentalisms create for us.

And he is saying "Don't be afraid! Be at peace! Yes, lots of things are changing, but what will never change is my love for you and my presence with you. And because of that, you can face anything. Because of that you can burst through those locked doors and go out to the world beyond them. Because of that you can be freed from your need for control ... and you can even celebrate your lack of control because that is the life of true faith ...because all the control the universe needs is me. And you can rest in that ... and be loved ... and not be afraid ... and be at peace That is the resurrection life!"

And so, being freed from anxiety and fear, being freed from the need to control reality, being freed from the NEED to cling to fundamentals to give us the illusion of control, we are free to engage with God in the wonderful discernment of what Truth is. We are free to be open to revelation -- not one of absolutes that speak of a universe that is black and white with nothing in between, but of guiding principles of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ through which God will reveal to us tiny pieces of a Truth that is far too big and wondrous and complex for us to apprehend fully, that certainly can NOT be controlled by us, that is far more interesting and beautiful and kaleidoscopic than the dull black and white world of fundamentalism.

A Truth that we approach kneeling in awe not stiff-necked in certitude.

The principles are ancient and simple and they permeate the writings of our faith. We find them in the parables-- the talents, the Good Samaritan, the lost coin, and on and on. We find them in Jesus' teachings on the greatest commandment -- love one another as I have loved you! We find them in the Christ hymn in Philippians -- where Christ sees ultimate power -- divinity -- not as something to be grasped but empties himself ... choosing self-giving love in relationship over grasping power.

I'm a big believer in the truth behind Psalm 127 -- "Unless God builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." There is truth, but that truth must be tested -- and Paul recognized this, too, when he talked about recognizing the "fruits of the spirit" (Galatians 5:22-26) and also exhorting the faithful to be "guided by the Spirit" and "not become conceited, competing against one another." but rather "crucifying the flesh with its passions and desires." -- words that to my ears are about humble submission to the awesome wisdom of God which we can NEVER fully apprehend nor control and not about feeding our addiction to control and worshipping absolutes that we believe we have fully apprehended and thus can use against one another.

1John 4 talks about "testing the spirits" and immediately exhorts his listeners to love one another. How do we determine truth? By following Jesus. By following the greatest commandment ... the law of self-giving love. The law that was made flesh in Christ incarnate, crucified and risen again. And in practice is there anything less black-and-white, anything more difficult to control, anything more wondrous and complex and messy and less prone to fit into the neat and tidy controlled categories of fundamentalism ... than love?

It is incredibly human that we as Christians -- like the rest of humanity -- are so prone to cling to the illusory safety of fundamentalism. But it's ironic, too. Because while very human and understandable, it's a reaction of fear in the name of one who stands among us saying "don't be afraid!" It's a vain attempt to control and predict reality in the name of a Christ who showed and shows us that reality is anything BUT controllable and predictable by anyone but God (Forget the resurrection ... do you think the people of Israel saw God choosing Moses? or David? or a young nobody girl named Mary? Think they saw that coming?). And it's more than ironic ... fundamentalism is an enterprise that is doomed to failure for two reasons.

First, because God is bigger, and "unless God builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." We can cling to all the fundamentals we want and pretend we have absolute control over Truth and an absolute corner of the market on it. But that will be a house of our building ... and it will not stand. Have fun.

Second, because the generations that are coming of age in these times of intense change are natives to that landscape the rest of us find so alien. And they aren't afraid. In fact, they're having a blast with it! Do they have the same needs for control over their environment and predictability of reality that the rest of us do? Absolutely! But change is relative and human beings are remarkably adaptive (that great "image of God" thing again, I suppose!), and the generations that are coming of age and will come of age in the decades to come are generations whose foundations are rooted in the same things that give the rest of us the heebie-jeebies! That's why they are able to have strong diverse and even contrary opinions about many things (human sexuality being but one) but largely don't feel the need to re-enact Sherman's March to the Sea OVER them.

Why is the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations declining? Well, one reason among many is that younger people -- raised in a generation with permeable boundaries all over the place -- aren't naturally creatures of brand loyalty the way the rest of us were raised to be. Maybe it's because just as we're moving into an age where nation-states will have less and less power, we're also moving into a post-denominational age as well.

And while that makes many of us older folks anxious and fearful, it's going to seem perfectly natural to my 8- and 5-year old.

The Good News is that God is doing what God always does ... sticking with us! If we have ears to hear and eyes to see, God is raising up a new generation of leaders who will sustain the Body of Christ -- ever changing and ever changeless -- into this new world. A new world that seems to many of us as radically different from our old lives as the one those women encountered at the empty tomb that Easter morning seemed to theirs.

We all have our fundamentalisms -- or at least most of us do ... or at least I know I do. They are seductive because they feel like they're about righteousness ... only they're inevitably about our righteousness and not God's righteousness. It's so, so tempting to get into the battle of my fundamentalisms vs. your fundamentalisms -- and to treat each other with limiting definitions that deny the beautiful complexity of one another and our lives as images of God. It's so, so tempting to cling to that which makes me feel right in part because it means you are wrong ... and it's so, so scary to step out from that into a reality that I cannot control or predict ... where that which is most dear to me is bound to be challenged or even stripped away.

But if that isn't the Christian life ... what is?

If that isn't the Way of the Cross ... what is?

If we're not about taking that radical leap of faith -- not individually but together as Christ's Body bound together in all our frustrating and wondrous diversity by his infinite love -- then what exactly are we about? And what purpose does this bizarre enterprise we call the Church serve other than to make us feel powerful and safe and RIGHT just as we are no change needed (a way of life I challenge anyone ever to find Jesus embracing!)?

And so if we are to be the Church, if we are to be worthy of the honor of being called the Body of Christ, we have to at least try to act like Christ. And that's not about easy answers. It's not about black and white and "I'm right and you're wrong." It's about being fools for Jesus, and loving those who hate you, and "give us this day our daily bread" and no more and tomorrow I'll pray it again and trust you'll give me enough for one more day, and meeting Christ in the unexpected eyes of the person living on less than a dollar a day, and being nailed to crosses all the while forgiving the guy with the hammer and trusting that even that is not the end but an amazing new beginning.

The problem with searching for THE reason for the church's decline is that the seeds of the decline lie in the very asking of that question! Our task is not to answer the question but to discard it and the search for absolutes it shrouds and instead to embrace the wondrous new, uncontrollable, unpredictable reality the shrinking of our church heralds. A new age in which God will shape us in new ways.

Scary? You bet! But we are up to the challenge. For we do not stand alone. For even as we hide behind the locked door of our fundamentalisms, Christ breaks through and stands among us saying.

Don't be afraid.

Be at peace.

Do you love me?

Feed my sheep.

2007-09-26T10:21:00.000-05:00

Holy Cow ... a new post!!!

It's been more than three months, and I've been meaning to get back to posting but haven't had the time. I just wrote the following in an email to my friend Rand, who sent me an editorial (excerpted below) from yesterday's NY Times. I decided to put it up here too ... mostly because I think my brother will fall out of his chair seeing that I've actually posted something....

Here's the editorial that started it:

The Center Holds
By DAVID BROOKS

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C.

At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party.
But now it’s clear that was only cosmetic. Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington.

In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. In the various polls on the Daily Kos Web site, John Edwards, Barack Obama and even Al Gore crush Hillary Clinton, who limps in with 2 percent to 10 percent of the vote.

Moguls like David Geffen have fled for Obama. But the party as a whole is going the other way. Hillary Clinton has established a commanding lead.

Second, Clinton is drawing her support from the other demographic end of the party. As the journalist Ron Brownstein and others have noted, Democratic primary contests follow a general pattern. There are a few candidates who represent the affluent, educated intelligentsia (Eugene McCarthy, Bill Bradley) and they usually end up getting beaten by the candidate of the less educated, lower middle class.

That’s what’s happening again. Obama and Edwards get most of their support from the educated, affluent liberals. According to Gallup polls, Obama garners 33 percent support from Democratic college graduates, 28 percent from those with some college and only 19 percent with a high school degree or less. Hillary Clinton’s core support, on the other hand, comes from those with less education and less income — more Harry Truman than Howard Dean.

Third, Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. As the journalist Matt Bai makes clear in his superb book, “The Argument,” the netroots emerged in part in rebellion against Clintonian politics. They wanted bold colors and slashing attacks. They didn’t want their politicians catering to what Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos calls “the mythical middle.”
Read the whole thing here.

This article rings pretty true to me ... speaking as one who falls into the affluent, educated intelligentsia category and has worked for Paul Tsongas and Howard Dean and is now supporting John Edwards (unless Al Gore gets in).

The thing is, I think Brooks misses the key point here ... and that's what media is shaping what group's opinions.

The netroots are largely confined to the smaller demographic group of the "affluent, educated intelligentsia" because that is the group that has both the continual internet access to read/participate in those online discussions and the time to do it. Many of them are people (like me) who spend a decent amount of their work time online and who use that time reading and writing about politics online. They are probably more likely to listen to NPR than Rush.

The broader demographic is shaped by the mainstream media. They listen to talk radio. They watch CNN and Fox News and the rest.

I don't think this is about one type of media giving more favorable coverage to certain candidates than the other ... after all, Oprah, who is the queen of influence and mainstream media, has vigorously endorsed Obama. It's about the broader message that comes from these two very different types of media.

Mainstream media deals in generalities, broad brushstrokes and sensationalism. They have discovered that drama ... and melodrama even better ... draws viewers. One leve of this is when OJ breaks into a hotel room in Las Vegas, everything stops. But it also means that they buy right into fear-mongering, because fear creates drama in the mind and heart of the viewer. Fear gets the adrenaline going. Fear is seductive and makes you keep tuning in because you want to be informed and you don't want to miss anything.

Fear also encourages us to think in the same black-and-white, broad brushstrokes that 24-hour cable news is built for. Fear and anxiety also make people long for the secure and familiar. For Democrats or anyone who is leaning that way, that's Hillary. Obama is black and inexperienced ... people can get excited about new ideas and inspired to hear him, but new ideas are risky, and when you're talking about a huge demographic that has been baptized into the fear culture, risk isn't something you're really interested in.

Edwards isn't risky in that way, but he's risky in another in that he is so deeply colored by his past failure. It used to be that you could run for president and lose and come back again later (without having been VP in the interim). Not anymore. There is risk in supporting Edwards because that roll crapped out last time.

Is there risk to Hillary? Well, she's a woman and for some people that's a risk ... but compared with the other candidates, she is definitely the safest bet. She is a Clinton, and for most Democrats/liberals/centrists, the Clinton era is looking better and better every day. She's also turned into a real hawk, part of which is to counteract the possible perception that she would be soft because she's a woman but (I think) mostly because it sells to exactly the group of people that Brooks is talking about and that she is capturing. Hillary is blowing away the competition because she is a known quantity and she makes people feel secure. And when you have people who are shaped by a media that trades on making them afraid, the candidate who makes you feel secure is the one you're going for.

That's also the only reason Giuliani is polling as well as he is. The guy is an absolute lunatic (there was an excellent article in Harper's called "a Fate Worse than Bush" about Rudy. Read it here - http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Giuliani-Worse-Bush1aug07.htm.), but he's got this iconic status because of 9/11.

Most people are shaped by mainstream media so most people are going to go with the candidate that makes them feel more secure. People who are more educated and affluent not only have more inclination and time to be reflective ... because of their wealth they are more likely to feel insulated from fear and more likely to want their leaders to take risks. They are more likely to go for the risky candidates -- and are thus more likely to support candidates who just don't appeal to mainstream America.

What could shake this all up is a significant shift in who actually goes to the poll and votes.

Because there is a much larger group. A group of people who don't watch CNN or listen to NPR. They don't read Daily Kos or listen to Rush. Many of them work multiple jobs and many of them have no jobs. What ties them all together is that they will not go to the polls because they are convinced it doesn't matter ... or at least that it's not worth the piece of their overburdened time it would take to be an informed voter.

These people don't go to political rallies or post online. They don't call into Dennis Miller and they don't write letters to the editor of the NY Times. And when they talk to their friends, the only politics they generally talk about is local ... unless it's in broad, largely critical terms.

If there was ever a candidate that could ever rouse this mass of people it would change the face of American politics. The problem is, for any candidate to be financially viable on the national stage they have to be sufficiently removed from the reality of this mass of people to render them unappealing to that group. Who is the last candidate that the lower middle-class and below actually believed cared about them. Bill Clinton had it a little bit, but before then? It hasn't been in my lifetime -- and, the more I think of it, I'm not sure it's ever been. I'd have to learn a lot more about electoral history before I could say.

The funny thing is, might not even know a candidate was doing this until the votes were cast. Because most of the polls were of likely voters, and as Amy Gardner said to Josh Lyman about when a third-party candidate might ever win the presidency "it's going to be the unlikely voters who do it." Josh calls them the people who are "too lazy-ass stupid to even raise their hands." I (using my own broad brush) call them people who have been completely convinced that raising their hands makes no difference whatsoever.

That will be something if that happens. But I'm not holding my breath.

2007-05-28T09:47:00.000-05:00

Memorial Day

Yesterday morning, we were driving home from church and Schroedter asked what Memorial Day was -- and it sparked a discussion. Not so much a discussion with Schroedter but a discussion between Robin and I about how to define Memorial Day.

Robin's immediate answer was, I imagine, the one she's been taught her whole life. Memorial Day is the day we remember the people who died fighting for our country, fighting for our freedom. (not an exact quote, probably, but I remember the words "our country" and "freedom" in there).

At that point, I objected.

The "fighting for our country" bit is tricky. Certainly the soldiers in Iraq are fighting under the flag of our country and are commanded their by the President of our country ... and in that respect they certainly are "fighting for our country" the same way Albert Pujols is "playing for the Cardinals." But when a war is not in the best interests of our country, it's hard to parse that.

The "freedom" piece is a no-brainer, though. There is nothing about what is going on in Iraq that is about fighting for our freedom ... in fact it is having the opposite effect.

For me, Memorial Day has always conjured up images of WWII vets, and so "fighting for our freedom" really did fit ... so I completely understand how those words came to mind. But that really hasn't been true in awhile and certainly isn't true, now.

Yet still, the sacrifice of these soldiers must be honored. Our troops in Iraq -- drawn overwhelmingly from the poorer economic classes and young men and women who signed up to be part of the National Guard (a force that, by it's own name, connotes domestic deployment ... and by the way, now that it turns out that in places like Arizona and Kansas we might actually need it, it's not there) ... they need to be honored, the living and the dead.

What did we end up telling Schroedter? I suggested "people who died in war wearing the uniform of our country" is who we remembered this Memorial Day.

It's sad when you have to parse Memorial Day.

2007-05-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

Make the candidates talk about the Millennium Development Goals

Do you want to hear the democratic front-runners' answer to this question?

In the Millennium Declaration of September 2000, 150 heads of state committed to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Are you committed to the Millennium Development Goals, and what is your view on the role of the U.S. in global partnerships to extinguish extreme poverty?

I sure do. Go to the Sojourners website and vote for this question.

On June 4, Clinton, Edwards and Obama will be live on CNN with Jim Wallis of Sojourners for a conversation on faith, values and poverty. Sojourners is giving us a chance to pick one of the questions -- so this is your chance to make the candidates talk about the MDGs and what they will do to make them happen if elected.

Go and vote ... and then go tell your friends to vote. Making poverty history means making our leaders know that we care -- and that we're watching them.

2007-05-19T07:15:00.000-05:00

Church, State and St. Dunstan

"The Church shouldn't be involved in politics."

I hear this one all the time ... particularly when I'm talking about the ONE Campaign or urging people as part of faithful living, to be in dialogue with their senators and representatives particularly about issues concerning the poor.

Enter Dunstan, 10th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, whose feast we celebrate today. Dunstan led a reform movement that closely bound the monasteries of England to the crown. He was a trusted friend of King Edgar and had a great deal of in the royal court.

Talking about Dunstan today as a positive model is liable to make lots of people nervous. Certainly the kind of merging of the State and a particular institution of the Church that existed in England (and greatly encouraged by Dunstan's efforts) is part of what this country was founded over against. Certainly a great fear with the current administration is that they are repeating exactly what happened with Edgar and Dunstan -- that the Church is being invited into the courts of the State and that the Church is actually doing the ruling.

I'm not arguing a return to the court of King Edgar. But I am arguing that even though it isn't part of our tradition as Americans, it is part of our tradition as Christians not to shy away from involvement in affairs of State. Sam Portaro, in his great companion book to Lesser Feasts and Fasts, "Brightest and Best," makes this point better than I:

"People are sometimes rattled (or annoyed)that I do not often wear my clerical collar. It is not that they need the symbol, but that they resent a religious person who goes stalking their world in plain clothes. Collaring their priest is rather like belling the cat so the birds will hear it coming: clerical collars warn the unsuspecting of a dangerous intrusion of religion into those spheres of life they prefer to keep separate from the church.

Dunstan believed that such separations are false, even contrary, to God's reality. There is no place in this world where God is not, and no place where we should not be. For him, politics and government were as much a part of life in God as his monasticism.

...God formed the earth and made us keepers of the chaos, co-creators. Dunstan brought this conviction to everything he did, closing the gap between religion and government, between religion and the arts, between religion and labor. He believed that the work of reconciliation entrusted to us is more than bringing affections together, uniting sentiments; it is also bringing the physical world back into union with its Maker. Doing just that, nothing more nor less than doing the work God has given us to do, here and now, is as sure a recipe for blessedness -- happiness -- as any."

The separation of Church and State is a critical thing to maintain ... but it is up to the State and the vigilance of the people to maintain it. It is about avoiding a merging between the State and the official structures of religion. It is about avoiding a State that is coterminus with the Church, where participation in the State mandates participation in the Church. It is not -- as it has developed into in much of the public consciousness -- a prohibition of the faithful from public life and discourse.

My problem with the Bush administration stocking the Department of Justice with graduates from Regent University and with trying to elevate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is not the intrusion of people of faith into the court of the King. It's that religious affiliation and a certain political bent were given greater weight in hiring than basic levels of competence.

Put another way, there are many reasons I wouldn't vote for any of the candidates who raised their hands at the recent Republican presidential debate saying they don't believe in evolution. None of those reasons have to do with their faith ... but some of them do have to do with me disagreeing with the path that faith has led them down.

When we say "The Church shouldn't be involved in politics," we're perpetuating a dualism that not only bankrupts the Church but cuts the legs out from under the State. If there is a clear demarcation from the sacred where the Church should be and the secular where the Church should not, then what relevance does the Church have as a transforming force for the world. Likewise, if we eliminate from the State all vestiges of theological thought, all words and actions motivated by faith, we rob the public sphere of not only some of the great thinkers of human history but of some of the best motivation for positive change.

2007-05-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

Where faith and freedom meet

I started this off as a comment on my brother's blog, but (predictably) it was going to be too long for a comment -- so I'm expanding on it here.

This morning, Ian (who has mastered brevity) posted this:

Two recent blurbs from an article in this week's New Yorker make me wonder why I have spent the past year studying the Bible:

'...A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches...'

and

'...Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount...'

The article in question is called "Atheists with Attitude" -- and it's a pretty good read. It gets its kick-start from people like Christopher Hitchens who has been making the rounds hawking his book, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." So far I've seen him on the Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.

Maher, of course, has been Hitchens long before Hitchens - and George Carlin was Maher before Maher ... and then there was Karl Marx, of course. Point is, taking shots at organized religion is nothing new. But there is something new happening -- and it's a natural progression of a society shaped by the freedoms of the Bill of Rights -- particularly freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

And I think it may be the best thing to ever happen to religion.

Look through history for when it was acceptable to criticize the dominant religion. You're not going to find a lot of instances. In many (most?) cases the dominant religion was so intertwined with the power of the state (the Marx argument) that to criticize the religion was to be a revolutionary. Even when our country was founded with the separation of Church and State, Religion -- particularly Christianity -- was so much part of the dominant culture (check what's written on your money) that criticizing it was risking social and economic ruin.

But something happened. The history of this country has been one of the people continually discovering what the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution really mean, continually pushing the envelope. And that's a good thing.

In many ways the U.S. is entering its teen years -- and we're acting like it. We've gotten a sense of what freedom is, and we're reveling in it. We're putting "question authority" buttons on our backpacks and radical quotes in our .sig lines. Combine this with the flattening of systems globally and the increasing ease to make our own communities rather than have to fit ourselves into the ones that happen to exist in our neighborhoods and there is much greater freedom to explore -- and to reject.

And so we're rejecting. As new generations come of age, and as a Boomer generation that pretty much thought it was God incarnate anyway moves into retirement, people like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are slowly moving from cranky voice on the margins to the voice of the people.

Of course, the Bush administration and the neocons have hastened this to worp speed. Take an administration that has so closely aligned itself with a cariacature of Christianity that is easiest to tear down to begin with ... and then have that administration be incompetent in just about everything it does ... and then have them stubbornly not only deny their own incompetence but also attest that -- inexplicably and with a wink and a nod toward the religious right -- history will prove them wise beyond reckoning some day in the future after we're all dead, and it doesn't take a lot of talent to prop up and tear down this straw man of faith.

But there's even more happening. As the flattening trend happens around the world. As people are experiencing more than the world outside their front door and are discovering their own freedom ... there's a backlash. It's a backlash of religious fundamentalism/extremism. A backlash that, using the worst of the religions they purport to embody, claims that it is cosmic forces of evil that are behind this new emerging world. And so what is happening is what always happens in times of extreme change -- those who resist it are circling the wagons (and in some cases, are going on the offensive) and trying to keep the sun from rising and the tide from coming in. The Bush administration and Al Qaeda are merely two sides of the same coin in this regard -- only the former has at least outwardly clung to some veneer of being civilized (though that truly is only a thin veneer).

So why is this a good thing?

I loved working in campus ministry. I still love being around young adults. I love being with people when they are taking the beliefs (or lack thereof) that were instilled in them in their formative years, and taking them out for test drives. I love that because what they end up with will truly be theirs ... and there's a chance for there to be a depth to it that can really change their lives -- and even change the world.

That's the opportunity if we don't fear this time of questioning and rejection of religion, but embrace it as an opportunity.

Does it surprise me that mainline Christians are ignorant of a basic historical tenet of faith? Does it shock me that a majority don't exhibit the slightest sign of Biblical literacy? Not at all. Because in this country the days where being a person of faith (particularly a Christian) was necessary for social and economic survival are fading fast.

The church, by and large, sees that as bad -- after all, it's harder to get people into church and there are definite financial rammifications to that. But I see it as good. Because when you really have a choice whether or not you want to be a part of a community of faith, saying yes has a much better chance of actually meaning something.

Either way, the world is what it is ... and The Church (broadly speaking) has several options for responding:

First, it can go the route of fundamentalist extremism. Hey, it worked for the Essene's right? We're the righteous remnant and we will be vindicated in the end. Problem is, when's the last time you saw an Essene? Sure, in the short term, the're going to be the ones who will answer Barna's questions correctly. But the forces that are reshaping the world are not the command and control of fundamentalism -- and churches that are fighting against them are just shouting against the tide. (BTW, this represents the right wing of the Episcopal Church)

Second, it can go the route of accomodation. Frankly, this is the one I find the most disturbing. This is when the Church sees that culture is becoming more secular so the Church mimics culture ... becoming more secular itself to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from the culture around it -- thus eliminating any real reason for being a part of it! It's this group that is the reason for those ridiculous statistics -- because in rigorously avoiding the traps of fundamentalism, they're so de-emphasizing the substance their faith does have as to become vapid and void. It's the church that says that what it stands for is "inclusion" ... without any sense of what they're including people into. (BTW, this represents the left wing of the Episcopal Church)

But then there is a third, middle way. A way that I think Anglicanism is uniquely poised to take, historically bent as it is toward via media. That's to do what my brother has been doing -- going back and really looking at scripture, but also looking at how God has worked through the life of the Church throughout the centuries and at the experience of God in our lives today. Honestly wrestling with the questions that honest engagement with those texts raise. Asking individually and corporately -- where are we being invited into a new incarnation of this faith? One that is not about the command and control Church of Empire. One that is not about a feel-good Gospel of "everyone's OK just the way they are, so let's join hands and sing Kum Ba Yah 'till blood spurts out of our ears."

There's a third way that isn't as easy for Bill Maher and Christopher Hutchens and even Karl Marx to tear into and tear down. About intelligent engagement with mystery. About rejoicing in beauty and the power of self-giving love. About the refining fire of discipleship that doesn't just leave us fat, dumb and happy where we are but which shapes us into something better, something that makes not just our lives better but makes the world better. An antidote for selfishness. A true hope for the hopeless.

Because Bill Maher and Christopher Hutchens and the rest of the "Athiests with Attitude" (though, Maher does say he's not an atheist, just an apathetic agnostic) have a point - religion has been used to poison a lot of things. But where they're wrong is that it doesn't mean religion is bad. It means human beings are broken and fallible (no news flash there) -- and it means religion that has been used to manipulate and control and be about one person trying to restrict another person's freedom for their personal gain is probably something we want to avoid.

But somewhere there is that place where faith and freedom meet. Where people can be invited of their own free will into a place where they see the good in giving up themselves for the sake of the other. Where they see the transforming power of self-giving love -- God's and ours -- and of their own free will may choose to embrace it.

I believe that will be the faith of the future. And that is why I hope and do not despair.

2007-05-11T11:03:00.000-05:00

Stephen Colbert explains the proper etiquette for requesting disaster relief
Perhaps the scariest thing about the Bush administration (now that would be a debate) is that we've moved so far past the point of hoping for competence that normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill incompetence doesn't make us blink. After all, there is so much off-the-chart, no-freaking-way incompetence that anything that falls beneath, let's say lying to Pat Tillman's family, or political motivated firings at DoJ or the clusterconsumation that is Iraq gets virtually ignored. The result is that the Bush administration can get away unnoticed and unscathed with ridiculous negligence and incompetence under a cover of its even greater incompetence.

Take the recent tornadoes in Kansas. Especially in the wake of Katrina, you'd think the administration would want to be pro-active (or at least active) in terms of disaster relief. But no. Not only were they not proactive, they were pretty well nonresponsive. Turns out at least part of the reason was that some of the equipment needed to move rubble off people in the Sunflower State is moving rubble off people in Fallujah.

Fortunately, the crew at Comedy Central doesn't let stuff like this fall through the cracks. I'm a little disappointed in Jon Stewart right now for the complete softball job he did in his interview with George Tenet. But Stephen Colbert his the Kansas disaster relief story out of the park.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars, here's Stephen Colbert sharing what Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius wishes she had known when she was hoping her national government would actually show up to the party this week.

2007-05-10T21:13:00.000-05:00

This morning, I was reading the reading assigned for today (Thursday in 5 Easter) in Celebrating the Seasons, and it struck me as a good one to share. It's from The Power and Meaning of Love by Thomas Merton.

The union that binds the members of Christ together is not the union of proud confidence in the power of an organization. The Church is united by the humility as well as by the charity of her members. Hers is the union that comes from the consciousness of individual fallibility and poverty, from the humility which recognizes its own limitations and accepts them, the meekness that cannot take up on itself to condemn, but can only forgive because it is conscious that it has itself been forgiven by Christ.

The union of Christians is a union of friendship and mercy, a bearing of one another’s burdens in the sharing of divine forgiveness. Christian forgiveness is not confined merely to those who are members of the Church. To be a Christian one must love all people, including not only one’s own enemies but even those who claim to be the ‘enemies of God’. ‘Whosoever is angry with his brother or sister shall be in danger of the judgment. Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that persecute and speak calumny of you, that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven.’

The solidarity of the Christian community is not based on the awareness that the Church has authority to cast out and to anathematize, but on the realization that Christ has given her the power to forgive sin in his name and to welcome the sinner to the banquet of his love in the holy Eucharist. More than this, the Church is aware of her divine mission to bring forgiveness and peace to all men and women. This means not only that the sacraments are there for all who will approach them, but that Christians themselves must bring love, mercy and justice into the lives of their neighbours, in order to reveal to them the presence of Christ in his Church. And this can only be done if all Christians strive generously to love and serve all people with whom they come into contact in their daily lives.

With all this talk about "instruments of unity" that is really nothing more than a misplaced attempt at a technical solution to the adaptive challenge of living in Communion, Merton offers something wonderful. What binds us together is not a common confession or an organizational structure or even a way of doing theology. What binds us together is our shared consciousness of our individual and corporate brokenness -- of our deep inadequacy and even deeper need of God. What binds us together is our common call to forgive because we ourselves have been forgiven of so much.

Our power lies not in drawing lines of who is in and who is out. Not, as Merton says, in our "power to anathematize" but in the power of hospitality. The power of welcoming. And not just welcoming as virtue in itself (as the left has inexplicably elevated "inclusion" to a high virtue often without considering word itself exactly what it is we are "including people into"!) but welcoming one another (for we are all sinners) to "the banquet of (Christ's) love in the Holy Eucharist."

Our welcome is not extended to something of our construction. Our welcome is only an extension of the the welcome we have received. Our love is only an extension of the love we have received. Our forgiveness is only an extension of the forgiveness we have received.

Of course there is room for people on both sides totally not to get what I'm driving at here. There's room for people on the right to feel self-righteous in that "love the sinner and hate the sin" kind of way and disguise through flowery phrases and high-sounding rhetoric the very anathematizing Merton rails against. There's room for people on the left to feel morally superior as more forgiving, more open and more loving -- even though such self-righteousness cannot coexist with the humility to which Merton (and Christ) calls us.

And, of course, there's plenty of room for me to feel self-righteously above the fray, to let my own anger at the conflict and the major players in it consume me and to bask in the glow of my own supposed wisdom in knowing better than them all.

And yet, as always, all these things bring all of us back to the same place -- convicted by our sin and brokenness, in deep need of forgiveness and love, and bound together most profoundly not by that which we fight over but by the brokenness that keeps us so deeply entrenched in the foxholes.

One of my favorite 1980s movies is Broadcast News. In it Albert Brooks plays what he plays best, an intelligent neurotic ... in this case a TV news reporter who is in love with Holly Hunter, who in turn is falling in love with a pretty-boy anchor (William Hurt) to whom Brooks feels morally superior but in every other way inadequate.

But before all this comes to a head, Brooks is musing with Holly Hunter on the phone about relationships:

"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive. If 'needy' were a turn-on?"

Maybe he's onto something. Only maybe today we could say:

"Wouldn't this be a great church if our brokenness and failure drew us closer together? If forgiveness and mercy were how we defined progress and victory?"

I think Merton would have liked that. I know I would like that. I wonder if Jesus would like it, too.

2007-05-05T21:39:00.000-05:00

"O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against a rock!" - Psalm 137:8-9

My silence on this blog hasn't been the usual "too busy" ... but not knowing where to begin.

It's been more than six weeks since I returned from Rwanda, and I feel like I'm just about ready to start talking and writing about it. There is so much to say, and yet there are not words to say it. But over the next week or so, I will try.

The picture you see is the wall of the church in Nyamata. Nyamata is just down the road from Mayange, where lies the Millennium Village I went to Rwanda to visit. It is in Bugesera district -- which is notable because it had the highest percentage of its people killed during the genocide -- nearly 70 percent.

This is no accident. In the decade leading up to the genocide, Tutsis were "relocated" into Bugesera. In the years leading up to the genocide, places like this church were the sites of "practice genocides" -- where the Hutu Power movement would see how many Tutsi's they could kill in an hour. Outside the church are the graves of the clergy who tried to stop them.

When the genocide began to happen, the people flocked to the church for sanctuary, for safety. They did not find safety there. The crowds found them there.

When you walk into the church and look up you see hundreds of tiny holes in the roof made by shrapnel from the fragmentation grenades that were thrown into the packed church. You can still see the bloodstains on the wall from when the crowd entered the church, ripped small children from their mother's arms and smashed them against it.

The church is a genocide memorial now. From behind the benches that once served as pews you can now descend staircases into a room with a large display case filled with skulls and bones -- remains of the dead. Out the back door there are two large mass graves -- mausoleums you can walk down into and stand in narrow passageways with coffins piled up on either side of you from floor to ceiling.

I went to Nyamata in the afternoon of my first day in Rwanda. That morning, I had been to the genocide museum in Kigali ... which I imagine I'll write about another time. In some ways that visit had anesthesized me... dulled the starkness of the skulls and coffins. Or maybe it was just that it was all too overwheming. I walked through it in somewhat of a daze ... with the most powerful feeling being that I didn't belong here. That this place was made sacred by the blood of the people who died there and what connection did I have to that other than being from a country that stood by and let it happen.

The altar stood as it had that morning ... only with a display case on it with some artifacts from people who had died there. Not thinking I walked up behind it.

I have been ordained for 10 years now, but long before then, the sanctuary of a church has felt like home. It's difficult to put into words, but there is a feeling of "rightness" ... of "home" to standing behind the Holy Table wherever it might be. And so it was in Nyamata as I slowly walked behind the altar. I wasn't expecting it, but all of a sudden I went from feeling like an outsider who was too much of a tourist in a place that needed penitents instead of tourists... I went from that to being a priest, a priest where he belonged -- at the table.

It felt right. It felt like home.

And then I looked down. And I saw the fair linen, the same one, I imagine, that lay on that table the day the genocide reached Nyamata. Only it was not a fair linen. It's whiteness was stained with dirt and dried blood ... the blood of those who had literally died on this altar.

I suppose going to Nyamata is a lot like going to Auschwitz. But what if something about Auschwitz was the most sacred place in the world to you ... a place where you have always felt perfectly at home and at peace. A place where even in the worst, most out-of-control times in your life, everything somehow made sense.

That's what it was like to stand behind that altar in Nyamata.

For all its beauty and incredibly hope, being in Rwanda is like staring into the abyss. I wasn't ready for it. I thought I would be, but I wasn't.

I suppose there are several levels of experiencing horrendous evil. There's hearing about it second- or third-hand from a distance. There's going to the place where it happened and seeing what it has wrought. And there's it actually happening to you.

I thought I'd been to that second place before. I thought I'd been to it in the Western Region of Ghana when I saw starving children literally living on top of a gold mine. I thought I'd been to it in Southern Sudan when I saw the militarization of the heart that had happened with 20 years of brutal civil war. I thought I'd been to it at the AIDS orphanage outside Pretoria.

But I really hadn't. Because as horrible as all those other places were ... the genocide is different and far, far worse. The genocide isn't just people's lives being torn apart and ended by the unthinking, unfeeling forces of corporate greed and the conscienceless marketplace. The genocide isn't even people being brutally tortured and murdered by invaders from another land.

The genocide was people -- from the wisest elder to the tiniest baby and everyone in between -- being raped, brutalized, maimed, tortured and murdered ... by their friends and neighbors. By people who knew them. Sometimes even by people in their own family.

In all the other horrendous evil I'd voyeuristically encountered in my travels, in every case I could explain its existence by our human ablity to demonize that which we don't know and understand. "If we could only see each other face to face," I believed. "If we could only really know each other in a way that would balance out the propoganda we could keep things like this from happening."

Only in Rwanda, they did know each other. The people who came into that church and dashed the children's heads against the stone, who covered that altar in blood, were not strangers from a distant land but their co-workers and friends. People who knew them.

And standing there at that altar, that place of surpassing love that in that love I had always found peace amidst all the unanswerable questions, all I could see was the blood. And perhaps for the first time I said out loud three words I have been saying over and over and over again since that day.

I don't understand.

And that's why I've been unable to write about this. That plus an almost overwhelming feeling of guilt that I should be so torn up over something that didn't happen to me, that it is an incredible almost self-indulgent luxury to feel pain about this when I didn't have to suffer any of it (and in fact by my and my countries inaction was a silent partner in causing it). But that's another story for another time.

Mostly it's because I don't understand. I don't understand how people can do this to each other. I don't understand how this horrendous evil can exist in the world. It doesn't make sense. It shakes the foundations of my life to the core. I have always believed that down -sometimes deep, deep down -- in all humanity, in all creation you will find good.

Standing at that altar for the first time that belief was seriously challenged. And even as I write this now, my head shakes almost imperceptibly, but uncontrollably side to side. No. No. No. I don't understand.

Standing at that altar, I looked into the mouth of the beast. I have seen darkness before, but I have always been able to spot the light shining in its midst. And yet at that moment, my eyes strained and were unsure.

I spend my life these days traveling around the country, around the church talking about God's mission of global reconciliation, about the Millennium Development Goals -- yes, about the horrors of extreme poverty, but mostly about What One Person Can Do about it. It is a message not of death and destruction but of possibility and opportunity. I have always been able to cast it in terms of resurrection ... and not just as spin but really believing that.

But how can that be here? As inexplicable as Psalm 137 has always been to me -- and yes, I realize it was written in anger by a people in Israel who were longing for the day when they could do to their captors what had been done to them -- I never looked at it square in the face. Stood in a place where children were dashed against walls by people rejoicing to do it.

I have a great urge to tie this up with a message of hope. To talk about the wonderful things I saw in Rwanda. To write of the resiliency of the people and how they are coming together to rebuild a country. And those things are true.

But to end like that would be to seem that I don't still scream those three words at God and mutter them silently to myself every day: I don't understand.

And maybe that's where this needs to end. Maybe as much as I want to understand how this was possible there is no way to understand because there is simply no reason to it. What happened happened. Sometimes what was, was and what is, is.

Perhaps it is not for me to understand. Perhaps it is just for me to experience a piece of it, and to let it haunt me, to let it change me, to let it make me profoundly uncomfortable.

Either way, that is where I am.

2007-05-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

Tired of what passes for electronic journalism today?

A glimpse back to the best the late 70s had to offer. More news and Les Nessman!

A real post coming tomorrow (finally!)

2007-04-07T09:15:00.000-05:00

Eleventh Station: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross

This Lent, Christ Church Cathedral gathered a community of artists (and a few of us non-artists)to construct a stations of the cross. We drew stations randomly at the beginning of Lent and got to work. You could use any medium you wanted, and there were a couple opportunities for the artists to gather and share their process during the season.

I drew station 8 -- Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem -- and at some point I'll probably put that one up and my reflection on it. But as we end the Triduum today, I wanted to share one of the most powerful stations I'd ever seen: Phoebe Dent Weil's expression of the 11th station -- Jesus nailed to the cross. You see the image above.

There is much I could write about this piece and what it brings up in me. But I think it best just to leave you with it, the photo that inspired it and Phoebe's words:

"My image of this station was inspired by a startling photograph on the front page of The New York Times (Tuesday, January 23, 2007) attached to an article. "88 Killed as Car Bombs Devastate Busy Baghdad Market" (by Marc Santora, Photo credit:" Wissam al-Okaili/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images). (MK note: here is a more complete and less sanitized story and analysis of the bombings)

"The photograph was taken in the immediate chaotic aftermath of an event of stunning horror inflicted by human beings against other human beings. A kneeling and weeping man tenderly covers the bodies of the dead lying on the ground. There are two guards attempting to keep order: one at the center wearing and Arab keffiyeh who motions towards a grief-stricken boy to keep at a distance; the other, off-camera on the left, whose white glove hinders the approach of the photographer. Between the two guards stands a young man whose impassioned grief can hardly be imagined; the cry of anguish, the outstretched arms, the half-kneeling stance -- all a total-bodily response to the deepest experience of pain and loss with its accompanying despair and anger and questions shouted to God, to the Universe, to all of us, "Look at this! Behold the horror! Why?" Behind him stands a weeping young boyh who reaches out to support him with one hand and comfort him with the other.

"It is a daring move to connect the act of nailing Christ to the Cross with the continuing acts of violence in Iraq that confront us daily in the news media, but the connection for me was immediate. In my interpretive rerarrangement of the photograph I have placed an image of the Crucifixion by the late 16th century sculptor, Giambologna, behind the main protagonist.

"We tend to resort to a kind of psychic numbing to protect ourselves from experiencing the depths of anguish that such horror demands. So, also, with the event of the nailing of Christ to the Cross: a moment of torture of one human being by another, the physical pain, the anguished cry of the victim confronted by the dark forces of the torturer who drives in the nails. The outstretched arms of the victim become the embracing arms of compassion in the face of those dark parts of humanity where compassion is absent. I have transformed the weeping boy who reaches out to comfort the grief-stricken man into an angel."

2007-04-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

Update on Mohammed

If you've been following this blog, you will remember an online conversation I had in February with "Mohammed Ibn Laith" (not his real name for security reasons), that began with me quoting some of his blog in a sermon and posting it and with him responding to my sermon and me responding to him.

Since then, I've been in conversation with the person who has set him (and others) up with their blog from Baghdad. Both Mohammed and I are interested in continuing to "meet" online in some sort of environment that would maintain his security but would allow us to continue to talk. While waiting for that to be set up, I got this word from the go-between. I actually got it at the beginning of my trip to South Africa ... and then a few weeks later got permission to post the words I am posting below.

Mohammed's father (Laith Abu Mohammed) was killed in the Arbaeen massacres of March 6th. Mohammed's mother (Zeynab Um Mohammed) died of her wounds incurred in the same attack on March 7th.

Hussayn Ibn Laith died a few days before his parents as he ran with his team to the scene of a bombing to rescue survivors - it was a cascaded bombing attack. In other words, more than one bomb ... the second one being timed to kill the rescuers and or people fleeing the scene. Hussayn was the brother who Mohammed mentions in "what will we talk about." He was 17.

Ali Ibn Laith (younger brother) was wounded together with his father and mother in the March 6th attack. He is physically recovering well. Mohammed and he completed the pilgrimage on foot to complete what their parents were doing. Ali is 8.

Mohammed is now in a 40 day mourning period. I am hopeful after that is over that we will be able to talk. But I also realize he very well may have no desire to be in touch with me. This was his last post, dated March 10:

Let us understand one another, you and I

O God! Pardon our living and our dead, the present and the absent, the young and the old, the males and the females.

I am a Muslim I am Iraki.

Do not come to me talking of your feelings. Do not come to me asking for forgiveness. Who do you think you are?

I will not ever forgive or forget what your country has done to us. I will not ever forget or forgive what your country has done my family, my city, my country, my people.

Never.

My grandchildren’s, grandchildren, will teach their grandchildren to hate America for what she has done to us. Never ever ever will I, or they, forget or forgive what your barbaric country has done to us.

Never.

Mohammed Ibn Laith

This week, we walk with Christ to the cross and beyond. An image that always comes to me this week is from Dorothy Sayers' "The Man Born To Be King," in which she talks about the dream Pontius Pilate's wife had (MT 27:19). In her mind, the dream was Pilate's wife hearing the words "suffered under Pontius Pilate" said ... not just by one person, but by generation after generation after generation of people for centuries in overlapping chorus.

We are judged by our actions not just in the moment, but throughout time. Pilate stepped back in cowardice in the face of the crowd at his defining moment and because he did, those voices of castigation have echoed throughout history.

The actions of our nation ... and the inaction of those of us who have not done enough to stop it ... are preparing their own echoes. They are the voices of people like Mohammed, whose pain and anger have voice that will carry long after the 40 days of mourning have passed.

2007-03-20T11:48:00.000-05:00

Connecting the Communion in the Mountains of Rwanda

Through a mutual friend, I was put in contact with the wife of the bishop of one of the Province of Rwanda's 10 dioceses and was warmly invited to come up for a day to visit. Today was the day, so I went to the bus park and crammed myself into a matatu (a mini-bus that probably should hold 12-14 people but in this case carried 20) for a bumpy and curvy trip into some of the most beautiful mountain country and agricultural regions I have ever seen. We are just entering the rainy season here, and this part of Rwanda is lush and green and beautiful.

When I arrived at my destination (a little unnerved by the policeman with the automatic weapon sitting in the seat in front of me the last part of the journey), the bishop's wife was waiting for me. After a quick stop by the office where she works (an organization that provides two meals a day for children orphaned by the genocide and HIV/AIDS), she took me by the Cathedral and (attached to it) a diocesan training centre. The centre is used by the whole community for vocational training and also training of leaders for reconciliation work. We then walked back to their house, many people stopping to greet us along the way (everyone here speaks Kinyarwanda, quite a few people speak French and almost no one speaks English. I've spent the whole week wishing I had retained more of my college French and speaking Berlitz-level Kinyarwanda -- I do know that "muraho" means "hello" and "murakoze" means "thank you" -- it's amazing how far those words and a smile will take you!) and also stopping by a class where orphans were being taught craftwork for sale in the market.

The Bishop joined us when we got to the house and we had a wonderful conversation and lunch. I was full of questions and they were both very patient with me -- and also eager to talk about their church. I'm very hesitant to talk about the genocide because I have only been here a week and even though it feels like I have seen so much, I am such an outsider and know I'm only seeing a few pieces of the puzzle. But one thing is for certain and that's this is a land and a people who have been through hell. The genocide hangs over and undergirds everything about Rwanda. The bishop and his wife were forced to flee during the genocide, and afterwards he spent time in refugee camps in several countries figuring out who among his clergy and others were alive and who was dead. Then as soon as they could, they came right back home and started rebuilding the church.

Both the diocese and the mother's union are a huge part of the social structure there. The primary school is run by the diocese, as is a secondary school many kilometers away from the diocesan center. There is a great deal of intentional ministry around HIV/AIDS, family planning, education, and health care. Most of all, the church plays a huge role in post-genocidal reconciliation -- helping those who were imprisoned for helping commit the genocide re-integrate into society after going through the local gacaca courts, bringing together survivors with the parents and spouses of the genocidaire. I have seen this ministry in other places in Rwanda. There is an organization called REACH/Rwanda (the diocese of SW Florida has been a big supporter of them) that is based out of the Kigali Diocese that trains religious leaders of all faiths in reconciliation and trauma healing. In a nation where there are THREE psychiatrists in the entire country (yes, that's right THREE), the church is providing ministry that is life-saving and life-giving.

We talked about the importance of women's leadership in the church -- and how the ordination of women had enriched both our churches.

And then over lunch, conversation turned to the current situation in the communion. And my experience talking with this bishop was the same experience I have had talking with other bishops and clergy and laity in Ghana and Sudan and South Africa. We disagreed - but we listened to each other. I heard him speak of how America loves to make big splashes and announce it is changing the world. How there is an arrogance about our country that assumes that others should fall in and follow behind us. How he thought the Lambeth resolution in 1998 was a wonderful thing because in his mind it affirmed homosexuals (his term) as children of God -- which absolutely is something we should do ... and which was a huge leap from where much of his society was, casting them out and calling them horrible sinners. How he interpreted General Convention 2003 as us taking us off that point of Lambeth -- a place he was happy to go, but was culturally a big stretch -- and forcing "our issues" on them.

And I tried my best to listen -- and to really hear him. This is a good man and a good bishop. He has risked his life for his people and continues to give his life for his people. He is not hateful - not toward gay and lesbian people, not toward Americans, not even toward the people who slaughtered his clergy and people. Even though part of me kept wanting to raise my hand and say "what a minute .. you don't understand" by grace, I was somehow able to restrain myself (those who know me will recognize a minor miracle!). He deserved a listen. And more than that, I realized I needed to really listen to what he was saying.

When it came my turn to respond, I knew I needed to be as straightforward with him as he had been with me (and he had warned me he would be blunt!). I told him how I voted at GenCon 2003 and that I thought the sin we (and I) needed to repent of was not what we did but not recognizing the deep effect it would have on the Communion. I said I agreed that we come off as arrogant and at times really are arrogant, that we have a cultural self-assurance and conviction and that it is too easy for us to confuse self-righteousness with God's righteousness. I said we are a culture that emphasizes individual rights and that our actions come out of that framework -- our concern for the rights of GLBT people, and our primary understanding of autonomy in the communion vs. their primary understanding of community in communion. I said that most Episcopalians I know really want to be part of the Anglican Communion. That we feel torn between wanting to honor these relationships and following what we really believe God and Christ would have us do with the GLBT people who are full parts of our church.

We disagreed. But we agreed that eventually, what was of God would stand and what was not of God would not. We agreed that we need each other and that there is so much we can do together. And when conversation turned to kicking the American church out of the communion and I said, "but let's say for the sake of argument that I am wrong and in need of conversion ... how can that happen if you push me away?" he laughed a great, booming laugh and said "Yes! That is good! I must draw you closer!"

And then conversation turned to more important things -- the great work he was doing. The training of lay catechists for their 300+ congregations. Education. Care for widows and orphans. Spreading the Gospel. The work EGR is trying to do bringing the church together around God's mission of global reconciliation in the MDGs.

As he left for a meeting, I asked him for his blessing -- and he laid his hands on my head and asked God's blessings on me, on my travel, on my work and on our relationship.

This is not the first time I have had a conversation like this, and I doubt it will be the last. I believe this is the true face of the Anglican Communion. Honest and even passionate disagreement? Yes. But disagreement while gathered (literally, in this case) breaking bread around the table. Disagreement while celebrating each other's missions and dreaming how we can labor together. Disagreement while greeting with a hug and parting with a blessing. No ultimatums. No threats. No walking out or dueling press machines.

Tomorrow I leave for home ... and I've actually spent a refreshingly little amount of time talking about issues of schism in the Anglican Communion during my week in South Africa and my week here in Rwanda. But I have spent a lot of time with Anglicans of many stripes. And the one thread that has run through all those encounters was a commitment to common mission. Through proclaiming the Gospel in word and deed.

That is the real face of the Anglican Communion -- "alive and well" as Archbishop Ndungane says.

At least it was this afternoon in the beautiful mountains of Rwanda.

2007-03-18T07:27:00.000-05:00

Random Rwandan Ruminations

There are about a dozen things I could write in depth about, but all of them need more reflection and less reactivity. I'm trying to gather pieces of a complex puzzle in less than a week, which is an impossible task. All I can really do is get a small sense of things and go from there.

I'm trying to hear as many stories and perspectives as possible. I've met with a lot of the Millennium Village people here and feel like I've got a good handle on what's going on with that. Yesterday, I spent a few hours with an Episcopal laywoman who is working for the Anglican church in one of the outlying dioceses and heard about Rwanda from her perspective. Today I went to church, coffee and lunch with Kimberly Buxton, who is working with Partners in Health in Rwinkwavu (I was hoping to go out to the site with her tomorrow, but those plans aren't going to work). Tonight, I'm having dinner with someone from REACH, a faith-based organization that is doing reconciliation work here (the Diocese of SW Florida has been involved in working with them).

Everyone has a different perspective ... which is really valuable. Some of them jive together. Some don't. I'll need awhile to put it all together.

So in the meantime, two random slices of life/other thoughts.

*Just to let you know the little I am learning about Kigali. It's a city of about a million people, but it's really a lot of sprawl -- there is definitely no downtown or skyline. It's very hilly. Most of the roads are unpaved, though major arteries are paved. There are plenty of stoplights but none of them work because the electricity is too expensive (they say they turned them on when Bill Clinton came).

The primary way people travel is walking, because that's the cheapest way to go -- and when you have close to 70% unemployment you really gun for cheap. The other popular mode of transport is thousands of little motorbikes that you climb on the back of and hold on. Traffic here is like NYC ... the lanes are more suggestions than anything else. And the motorbikes are always zipping in and out of everything.

The combination of all this -- lots of pedestrians (who just wander into traffic with great regularity), zipping motorbikes, permeable lanes and no stoplights makes traffic an interesting experience. But like in most places like this, people seem to have an intuitive sense and so nobody gets hurt.

*There seems to be a real catch-22 with developing industry here. Labor is incredibly cheap (which has its pros and cons, obviously). But raw materials are incredibly expensive. Why? Because there is little infrastructure here to produce and refine raw materials, so they have to be imported. A major source of revenue for the Rwandan government is tariffs on imports -- which drives the prices of materials WAY up.

The argument for this is that the tarrifs protect domestic industry that would have a hard time competing against cheaper foreign goods (This is where Andrew Langan will get interested). Problem is, there is no domestic industry to protect and the high cost of goods with which infrastructure could be built to actually BUILD domestic industry prohibits domestic industry from developing.

This is a great example of how a comprehensive approach of aid, debt relief and trade is important. You need aid ... but the ultimate goal is to have a society that doesn't need aid. Aid industries should be in the business of putting themselves out of business and aid should be used in ways that promote local development. That's why microfinance -- when done properly (and I'm still learning what that means) is such an intruiging option. But in this system, protectionist trade policy is actually preventing economic development -- and all the aid and debt relief in the world isn't going to enable Rwanda to stand on its own two feet economically if those don't get eliminated or at least phased out.

More later.

2007-03-16T03:54:00.000-05:00

Crucifixion and Resurrection

Crucifixion and resurrection are at the heart of our faith. They're also metaphors that are used often enough that it's easy for them to lose their power. None of us were at Calvary that Friday and none of us have every seen a crucifixion -- but if we had we would understand that it's not a metaphor for difficulty but it is blinding pain and the desolation of death. And none of us were there Sunday morning to find the stone rolled away and the tomb emtpy -- but if we were we would understand that it's not a metaphor for triumph but it is awesome and impossible, wonderful beyond words and yet terrifying.

I think if I were really at the crucifixion and having to write about it, I wouldn't be able to. Ditto for the resurrection. And that tells me a little about yesterday.

It would be easy to talk about Thursday in terms of crucifixion and resurrection. And it would be a useful metaphor -- if not all too easy to use. And there are definitely ways it would be accurate. But still it seems inadequate. We'll see.

First, crucifixion. I didn't witness crucifixion yesterday, but I heard tell. And I saw the aftermath. In the morning, I spent 2 1/2 hours at the National Genocide Museum in Kigali and in the afternoon, I visited the genocide memorial in Bugesera District (where 65% of the population was slaughtered -- the hardest hit district in Rwanda).

And I can't write about it. Maybe in a week, maybe in a month, maybe sometime in the future I'll be able to. But for now I can't. I just can't. Suffice it to say that the genocide hangs over and undergirds everything that happens here. If the genocide is crucifixion and the rebuilding of Rwanda is resurrection, there is no neat dividing line of Holy Saturday. Crucifixion, the blinding pain, the desolation of death continues even as resurrection begins.

And so ... resurrection.

I can write about this part ... which tells me something, too. It's not as in-your-face. In many ways it's more of a hint, a peripheral glance rather than in your face.

Resurrection in Rwanda isn't happening all at once. And in many places it's not happening at all. The unemployment rate is near 70%. Economic growth has been trumpeted and it has been good but so far the benefits have only been felt by the top economic strata (though there is lots of hope it is trickling down because lots of important infrastructure is being built).

But slowly, it is happening in one of the least-likely places. It is happening in Mayange in Bugesera, where the Millennium Village is.

If you've read this blog before, you've heard me talk about the Millennium Village in Mayange. It's an integration of development principles starting with a target group of 1,005 households aimed at meeting all the MDG goals and targets at once. What makes Mayange different from other MVs (and many other programs) is the degree of buy-in of the government (and the comparatively low corruption index of the government), methods of intervention that encourage sustainable development rather than dependency, and a plan to scale the project up beyong the village to the entire country.

Mayange isn't an oasis. It has a long way to go. There is still incredible poverty. There is still malnutrition. Domestic violence is epidemic. There is lots of undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. But there is positive momentum. Something is happening here, and it's incredibly exciting.

I tagged along with Josh and a group from a medical conference for a tour yesterday, and I'm heading back this afternoon. The first stop was the health centre.

The first thing you notice about the health centre is that it's bursting with people. The waiting room is full. There are lines outside the lab, the pharmacy, and many other places. It's not a large complex and they are maxing out the space and need to grow.

This is a good thing. No -- this is a great thing. The centre serves about 500 people a day, and that's great news because it means people are accessing the health care. It also means they are accessing health care earlier on in illness when prevention and early-stage treatment are possible.

One example: The under-five mortality rate is 15 percent in this district. When they got here, they would have 3-4 funerals (mostly of children under five) a week. They haven't had a young child funeral in four months.

Another example: When they first opened the centre, about 80 percent of the patients had malaria. Now that's down to 10 percent -- thanks to an integrated system not just of distributing bednets, but of education, monitoring of use and tying bednet use to availability of other things -- like agricultural interventions (ERD's Nets for Life program is using similar strategies).

The key has been not just fighting disease but working hard to change the health care system. By removing barriers like co-pays and the need to travel long distances and pay fees to have pictures taken for IDs (they now have a mobile webcam and printer that goes to where the people are and takes the pictures for free), they now have the vast majority of the people enrolled in a system where people pay what they can but nobody is denied treatment.

Expensive? Not as much as you might think. The per capita cost for health care in this MV is $25 with fixed costs (staff salaries, electricity, infrastructure) and $8 without fixed costs. That's below MV hoped-for standards and certainly sustainable.

People are getting in, getting treatment and getting better. You can make an argument that health care is more accessible to the entire population in Mayange than in St. Louis!

We then went to one of the fields and heard about the agricultural innovations, like progressive terracing, which uses trench-digging to maximize the ability of rainwater to get to the lower levels of soil and not just run off taking all the nutrients with it. They've planted nitrogen-fixing trees every three meters to help replenish the soil over time.

But the big new thing is a massive fertilizer loan program (I'm headed back for the big celebration of its launch this afternoon).

Other programs (and most, if not all, of the other Millennium Villages) give away the fertilizer, which creates a culture of dependency. The loan program will enable growers to sign up for a loan of fertilizer and maize. At the harvest, they will pay it back in maize or in cash. 70-75 percent of the people have signed up (they were hoping for 30%). And they've tied it to use of progressive terracing and membership in the health care system.

If there is an icon for what is going on in Mayange, it is the children.

That there are children at all is life and light. The genocide was 13 years ago (though massacres began years before that), and our visit was greeted by children much younger than that. Children who are the rising generation of post-genocide Rwanda

There are children at the health center. They are sick, but they're getting treatment.

There are children on the street. They are poor, but they are not hopeless.

Most of all, they are children with dignity. Walking up the street toward Josh's house yesterday morning I was approached by a child asking for money. The children in Mayange don't do this. They don't beg. They smile. They follow us everywhere. They clamor to have their picture taken so they can see themselves. They try to practice their English on you. But they don't bed.

They have dignity. And dignity, more than anything, is the foundation for development not just of an economy but of the identity of a people.

And maybe that's the real resurrection. Rwanda is a nation the West looks on with guilt and pity. It has a horrible past that flows into the present and will flow into the future.

But it is a place of great beauty. And at least in Mayange, it is a place of dignity and pride.

And as much as the shadow of the past is still cast into the present, in those children you can catch a glimpse of the future. A future worth looking forward to.

2007-03-14T15:53:00.000-05:00

I'm in Rwanda -- and Blogger knows I'm here!

I'm writing from Kigali, Rwanda -- and apparently when you log on to Blogger from Kigali, it knows you are in Rwanda and so everything is in French -- which is kind of interesting (Google comes up in English but offers links to versions in French and Kiswahili).

The conference ended well. There is a very lengthy outcomes document that will eventually be up on the EGR website -- 12 or so recommendations for the Anglican Communion and for Lambeth. Really good stuff, and it works really well as a summary document of the program content. It doesn't capture the really amazing relational content -- but of course there is no real way to capture that. Still have lots of stories to tell from that conference, but I'll space those out over time when I get back.

The flight to Kigali was an easy 4 hours -- and it really feels like I'm in Africa now. Whereas Johannesburg (until you get out to the townships) has a really European/British/first world feel to it, just flying into Kigali felt like flying into Accra. Low-light streetlights so the streets don't really show up from the air. Most of the stoplights were off on the way to Josh and Alissa's place ... don't know if that's a power outage or if they just turn them off after a certain time.

Anyway I'm at Josh and Alissa Ruxin's house now. Josh is the professor of public health at Columbia University who does the Millennium Villages Project in Mayange (and Alissa is his wife). They've got a nice place. It's also kind of a hostel for folks who visit him from out of town, so I fit right in.

There's an interesting crowd staying at the house right now. THere's an old friend of Josh's who is the recently-appointed New York Times bureau chief for East Africa. His wife works with him shooting video of the stories he files for the NY Times website. They're here after spending time in the Congo (which she was telling me all about tonight -- and trying to explain the three-way dynamics of the conflict there, which was really not easy at all). Also staying here is a nurse practitioner from NYC who has been volunteering for Josh doing public health work in Mayange for the past six months, and also the director of the public health track at Columbia (who's specialty is clinical psychiatry in epidemiology).

Another thing that makes it feel a lot more like my previous trips to Africa than staying at the conference center is the need to be much more mosquito-conscious. I have a net over my bed and the one house rule is to make sure the screens are secure (Josh and Alissa have both had malaria and don't want a repeat -- and needless to say, I'd rather avoid it, too!)

Tomorrow is a day in Kigali and will be pretty relaxed. I'm going to grab a taxi to the Genocide Museum in the morning. I've got some phone calls to make to try to set up some other stuff, but it looks like I'll be in Mayange on Friday and Saturday, back in Kigali on Sunday -- possibly out to Buyumba on Monday. The whole country is the size of Massachusetts and the roads apparently are fairly decent, so it doesn't seem like it's going to be too hard to get around.

Exciting things are happening with the Millennium Villages Project here. Paul Kagame (Rwanda's president) brought just about all of his senior government officials out to Mayange last week and it became official that things have gone so well that they're going to scale up the project for the whole country. They're changing the name (making it part of their 2020 development programme) so they can have ownership of it, but it will be all the same interventions.

This is incredibly exciting -- and because the churches are such integral service providers in the communities, it presents a lot of potentially cool opportunities for the Anglican church here to get involved. That's my potential trip to Buymuba -- thanks to the Rev. Amy Coultas (who has the daughter of the Bishop of Buyumba in her campus ministry at Louisville), I'm going to get a chance to go meet the Bishop and his wife and talk about some of this stuff.

Well, it's late and I need to crawl under my net and get some sleep. More tomorrow.

2007-03-12T10:31:00.000-05:00

God grant us...

The only downside to skipping out on Saturday with the Pilgrimage to Peace group was that we missed hearing from the Rev. Michael Lapsley (ENS' Matthew Davies did an excellent story on his presentation here). Michael is an Anglican priest and director of the Institute for Healing of Memories in Cape Town. A native New Zealander, he became a tireless and prophetic advocate for the end of Apartheid upon moving to South Africa in 1973 -- continuing even after the government expelled him from the country a few years later. In April, 1990, he came back from a trip abroad and opened a magazine that had come in the mail. The magazine contained a bomb. The explosion took both of his hands, an eye and shattered his eardrums.

This morning, the P2P crowd got a chance to meet with him in a small group and +Marc Andrus invited me to tag along. Powerful doesn't even begin to describe the experience, but I'll try to convey his talk in as many of his words as possible.

He framed his talk with the serenity prayer. You know it:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

And through telling his story he talked about doing just that ... and how that process helped change the course of a nation, the world, and his life.

Michael Lapsley never thought he'd end up in South Africa. He never particularly wanted to. He had joined a religious order and when it was time for him to be sent out he asked to go to Japan ... but they sent him here. He talked about what he expected to find:

“I assumed that when I got to South Africa that I would find three groups. The oppressed, the oppressors and the third group – the human race – that I would belong to.”

“The day I arrived in South Africa, I stopped being a human being and became a white man. Because every single part of my life was determined by the color of my skin. I lived in my white suburb because by law that was the only place I could live.”

There were lots of examples. Bathrooms labeled "whites only" and "non-whites." Restaurants where whites ate inside and blacks had food passed to them out the window. And then there was the greatest icon for him, the elevators he saw when he went to the university -- one labeled "whites only" and the other "freight and non-whites." If you weren't white you weren't even considered human.

In South Africa, being white decided everything. And as much as he hated what his color meant, his color was one of the things he could not change.

"My color meant that I was part of the oppressor group regardless of whether I wanted to be or chose to be. I could choose to fight against it, but I would fight it from the side of the beneficiary.
He did have a choice -- between two options. A pretty simple one, as he saw it:

Beat 'em or join 'em.

And with that choice began what he called a long "journey of accompaniment" with the people of black South Africa.

"Apartheid had turned me into an oppressor, but I wanted to be a human being. So fighting it was not first to do something for other people but to free myself in solidarity with others."

He noted that parallels have been drawn between the U.S. civil rights movement and the battle against Apartheid. That doesn't do the anti-Apartheid struggle justice. In America, the civil rights movement was about asserting rights under the constitution. In South Africa, the constitution was part of the problem. This was about people who were non-entities, for whom the constitution did not apply. This was not a civil rights struggle but a struggle for national liberation.

As I've heard about the struggle against Apartheid the past few days, I keep coming back to Bishop Peter Lee of Christ the King Diocese telling me how South Africa is 85 percent Christian ... and that is how so much of the reconciliation was able to happen, because of that basic commonality.

But if that is true in the aftermath of Apartheid, in the truth and reconciliation process, it means it was also true during Apartheid.

In 1976, children -- young teenagers, 13, 14 and 15 years old began protesting in Soweto. Protesting bad schools. Protesting having to learn lessons in Afrikaans. And in the streets of Soweto, these children began to be shot. All in all more than a thousand of them were shot.

And for Michael, in addition to the horror, with that came a revelation. That “those who shot children went to church on Sunday, read the Bible every day and shot kids.” Apartheid and the brutalism it supported was being carried out by people under the banner of Christ -- even though it was in direct opposition to the Gospel of Christ.

The church has a long history of association with oppression. That we are here talking about the Millennium Development Goals as a Christian body has to include an acknowledgment that these goals are necessary in large part because of the actions of largely Christian western societies. Marching as the oppressor under the banner of Christ is nothing new. But it is a life of great dissonance.

Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, and he said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Yet oppression prevents us from living that great commandment, that "love commandment" because it prevents the relationship of neighbor.

This realization led Michael to join the African National Congress, an organization not looking to substitute oppression of whites for oppression of blacks, but looking for a South Africa without oppression. The vision of the ANC was simple – South Africa belongs to all South Africa

"Freedom has to be for everybody or it is for nobody."

"Apartheid was a choice for death carried out in the name of the gospel of life. It was an issue of faith to say no to Apartheid. At stake in South Africa was the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because either the Gospel was true or Apartheid was true."

As far as the ANC's uses of violence, Michael had this to say:

“The only automatic weapon I’ve ever used is the one I’m using now – my tongue. Eventually they were so stupid that they took away my hands, which I didn’t need to shoot, and they left my weapon working reasonably well.”

Struggles over fundamental issues of justice and human rights are not unique, but what made a difference was how South Africa's struggle became a global struggle.

"Most western governments supported apartheid even though they said different. But they were brought kicking and screaming by their populations. By people of conscience around the world. People realized there was something in South Africa that concerned the humanness of all of us."

And something else was happening:

"In South Africa, the struggle was getting younger and younger. Desmond Tutu called it 'A generation of young people that had iron in their souls that could face the bullets and go on'"

And the struggle began to work. Through pressure brought on by people of conscience rising to demand their leaders listen and act. Michael began to be more in demand as a speaker to rally the world for the cause. And it was in coming back from one such trip (to Canada, I believe) that he went to his desk and opened the magazine that would change his life forever.

The blast maimed him permanently. He stood before us with hooks where his hands used to be and only one functioning eye. But he holds to the memory with more than just pain.

"It’s important that I remember the moment not to remember the pain but to remember the strong sense that God was with me… That the great promise of scripture had been kept … Lo I am with you always even to the end of the age."

It also gave him a choice. If he chose to give in to despair they would have won. If he chose to continue to embrace life and the mission God had called him to, the Gospel would remain victorious.

But it was not easy.

"I could not have made a lifegiving response by myself without the community of prayer and support."

And that was another lesson. We don't make lifegiving choices from death-producing situations by ourselves. We need each other. We have each other.

"The peoples of the world walked beside me on my journey of healing. God was calling me to walk beside others on their jouyrney of healing."

And so as Michael healed and Apartheid fell, he began to ask the Quo Vadimus question. "Where are we going?"

For South Africa, the answer was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- a work of grace and genius credited for helping a country transition out of Apartheid without the bloodbath that had been almost universally predicted.

But what people don't often recognize is that the TRC only heard the most extreme cases - murder and rape. Sure, 22,000 people gave testimony before the TRC. But South Africa is a nation of 43 million people. Those who got to participate in the process were only an icon for those who did not.

And that's where the Institute for the Healing of Memories began. It's a place where people can come in groups to "take the first step on the road to healing." It's a place to start. And the work he is doing there is being replicated around the globe, for as Michael says:

"Each country in the world is different, each country has different histories. But pain is pain is pain."

As I write about this, I think of last November when I sat in the Waverly, Iowa dining room of Kathryn Koob. Kate Koob was one of 52 Americans held for 444 days in Iran from 1979-81. And yet today she teaches reconciliation at Wartburg College.

In two days I will get on a plane for Kigali and spend a week in a land where a dozen years ago one group of people, as part of a cycle of oppression going back more than a century, rose up and slaughtered nearly a million of their fellow countrymen and women. And yet through a process similar to the TRC, they are rebuilding their nation.

The human capacity to embrace reconciliation is beyond amazing. And we need it.

The system of global wealth and poverty is an Apartheid system. There is nothing else to call it. Those of us in the (largely white) rich nations separate ourselves from the (largely non-white) poor two-thirds world. And like the destitute townships and shantytowns I drove through yesterday that grew up around the whites-only towns to house the people whose sweat served white South Africa, our wealth has been enjoyed on the backs of the poor.

And as if the image weren't clear enough, now we're actually, physically building a wall on our southern border to keep the "other" out.

When people looked at South Africa in the 1970s, they looked at it several ways:

Some saw it as an acceptable state of affairs -- perhaps somewhat evil, but necessary to maintain "the way things ought to be".

Some saw it as an intolerable state of affairs. A fight that must be joined.

Was Apartheid sustainable indefinitely. Some on either side would have said yes. But those with eyes to see and those who knew history knew differently. And almost all of them said the same thing:

There's no way this ends well.

And yet look what happened. Not without pain and death -- Michael would be the first to say that -- but the truth is I sit in a Johannesburg in 2007 that 20 years ago nobody would dare to dream. Sitting in a room with people of many colors listening to a man with no hands talk about loving the neighbor that did it to him.

So we have our Apartheid. An Apartheid that says for billions of people that where you are born decides how you live and even whether you live.

And many see it as an acceptable state of affairs -- perhaps somewhat evil, but necessary to maintain "the way things ought to be".

And some see it as an intolerable state of affairs. A fight that must be joined.

But is it sustainable? Some will bury their heads and say yes. But those with eyes to see. Those who know about economic and environmental sustainability and yes, those who know history will say differently.

And many of them are looking at the handwriting on the wall and saying the same thing they said of South Africa in the 1970s:

No way this ends well.

But that is not us. We are not people who shrink back in despair. Despair is not a Gospel value.

I was born in Santa Clara, California. I am an American. My children are Americans. As a straight, white, educated, homeowning American I am part of a class priviliged beyond any on earth.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

But here's the thing. As intractable as the systems that keep billions of people in poverty, that kill a child every three seconds, that keep water toxic for more than a billion people... as intractable as these systems seem, are they really more intractable than the system that went from blacks taking elevators as freight to being elevated to the highest office in the land?

I have a choice. I choose to believe those systems are changeable. I believe that is wisdom -- to not resign myself to intractability, to recognize that this is something we can change. That where we are going is on a road to freedom for all. A road that South Africa has made just a little bit smoother before us.

God grant us the courage.

2007-03-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

Other looks at the TEAM Conference

There are lots of people here and lots of good ways to find out what's going on. Here are some highlights:

Mary Frances Schjonberg and Matthew Davies of Episcopal News Service have been providing excellent coverage, both of the TEAM Conference and of the Pilgrimage for Peace. For the nuts and bolts and some good features, there's no better source.

There are a couple young adult blogs. The Pilgrimage for Peace group is blogging at www.bishopmarc.com and the young adult delegation to the conference is blogging here.

Also blogging from here are the Rev. Amy Real Coultas, a priest from Kentucky who is here with Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Also is the Rev. Will Scott of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco (here with P2P).

2007-03-11T15:29:00.000-05:00

Church in the townships

This morning we got on buses that distributed us to different congregations in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria for church services. The bus I was on made four different stops and we were the last stop. That meant we arrived when the service was 2/3 over. That was really OK. First, there was still an hour left in the service. Second, I got to drive through all these townships, which was really interesting. A lot of it is shantytowns ... just acres of people living in little shacks made of pretty much whatever they can find to make a shack out of. It was like the worst parts of the neighborhood where James lives in Accra.

I sat next to one of the volunteers for the conference for most of the trip. She was a marketing student at a university in Johannesburg and really bright. We talked a lot about the government and she told me a lot about life in the townships and I told her about some of the urban problems we have in America -- which really surprised her. Since her vision of America pretty much comes from TV and movies, she had no idea that we had homelessness and that a lot of our city schools were really bad.

I was the only American in the group I traveled with (there was one other, but he identified himself as from the Dominican Republic because that's where he's living doing medical mission work). The rest were from Madagascar, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique and Zambia. What was interesting (and a little disturbing) about that was the distinctly different reaction I got when I introduced myself and said where I was from. Everyone else got an enthusiastic greeting, but when I said I was from the United States it went up several decibels and then there was this noticeable buzz afterwards ... and then the priest made a comment after in Zulu and the only nation he mentioned was "United States" ... and there was more buzz.

Of course the people were wonderful and the hospitality incredible. Probably the most powerful moment for me was when one of the lay ministers got up to talk and talked of how this is a nation that lives reconciliation and hospitality. I wish I could remember the words exactly, but he spoke of Apartheid and all they had been through and how through it all their common identity in Christ had seen them through.

Another interesting thing about the service was that the church was full -- but about 90-95% of the congregation was women. I asked the priest about that and he said it was "a South African phenomenon" -- you couldn't get men to come to church. He said it wasn't as bad in his last congregation, but this was extreme. I told him it wasn't just a South African phenomenon ... that in many American churches, women are the clear majority (it was interesting that all the service leaders were men, though).

Upon returning we had a plenary session with the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme. They do good work, but the presentation was really dry. The best part was the questions -- not so much her answers, but the passionate questions that came from the audience. Two Sudanese people stood up and talked about Darfur and also the challenges of the South. Someone asked about genetically modified food (she never answered that question ... too bad). Lots of questions about moving people to self-sustaining solutions -- which is their goal, but the truth is a lot of the people they serve are so close to starvation they're just medically quite a ways away from being able to function in the economy.

For the workshop time, I chose one on refugees -- not so much because of the topic but because the format was listed as "group discussion." I wasn't disappointed. Details of that are below.

And with all that, the highlight of the day was yet to come. At the last minute (i.e. this morning), the Pilgrimage to Peace crew were told that they were leading evening worship tonight. They came up with the most amazing, lively-yet-still-contemplative worship service. The two young adult musicians from Mozambique wrote a song for the service. The whole crew danced in singing and got the whole congregation moving. The prayers were wonderful. There was a wonderful period of silent meditation. And after it was all over they all (and a few others of us) stayed and danced and sang for another 15 minutes or so.

It was a real breath of fresh air and hopefully gave people a taste of the energy that is available to this movement if we give power to young people. Another plus for me is I got to watch Amber help lead worship, which always makes me not only proud and happy but incredibly thankful for how much God has blessed me with intersecting my life with wonderful people like her for so long.

Tomorrow the focus is HIV/AIDS. Hope you all are well. More later.

2007-03-11T12:23:00.000-05:00

Invisible People

When I was in high school, my church – St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona, -- was a participant in the Sanctuary Movement. Sanctuary helped people who were on death lists in countries like El Salvador get across the border illegally and find safety in the United States. Occasionally when we were over at the rectory for youth group there would be some of these people. Sometimes they would play a guitar and sing. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak more Spanish than to ask where the library was (not quite conversational), so that was the extent of our relationship.

Three years ago this June, I was living in Accra, Ghana and went with a Liberian friend, her cousin, and one of my students (Mackinnon Webster) to the Buduburam refugee camp (you can read my old blog entries about it here). I stumbled onto an Episcopal Church and school there and met a seminarian named Eddie Hennings … a Liberian refugee who was starting his theological education and hoped to come to serve that congregation (All Souls) if and when he was ordained. They not only had no priest, they had no money for one.

We raised about $2,700 for All Souls and they took that small amount of money and built a computer training center from the ground up (the dollar can go a long way in Ghana) so that children and adults alike could get computer skills to make them more employable. Eddie and I have stayed in touch ever since.

There are more than 12 million refugees in the world today … and that number is WAY soft. And that’s not counting the millions more of “internally displaced persons” (IDPs)– who cannot be classified as refugees because they have not crossed a border but whose lives are often in greater peril because they have no protection from the persecution they are fleeing.

Refugees, IDPs and asylum seekers are probably the most vulnerable people on earth. In our country, we put them in detention centers that are basically prisons – where they can remain without processing for decades. They cannot go back where they came from and the people and governments where they are don’t want them. Even as a rising generation that is increasingly interconnected, globalization, the internet and increased travel are making national boundaries more permeable, increasingly rigid and xenophobic immigration laws and policies are turning many nations – including our own – into gated communities in the global village. And refugees are, as the vulnerable usually are, the ones most adversely affected.

That the Millennium Development Goals fail to mention refugees is not surprising. They are the world’s invisible people – so why should this be any different. And yet many live in the same kind of poverty the MDGs strive to address.

The programmatic highlight of today was a “group discussion” (praise God – an ACTUAL discussion with many people taking part) led by Richard Parkins of Episcopal Migration Ministries and the Rt. Rev. Ian George, an Australian bishop who works on refugees for the Anglican Communion. EMM does amazing work in refugee resettlement and political advocacy here in America, but still can only scratch the surface of the problem. The Anglican Communion, seemingly well-positioned as a global network to share information and resources about refugees can’t get its act together. Repeated messages from Bishop George to all the primates to help form the most basic of networks have yielded responses from only half of them.

This is an area where we really could make a difference – not only for current refugees and more just immigration policies – but because refugee crises are always preceded by human rights abuses, the Communion could potentially function as an excellent “early warning system” and mobilize resources to try to stop the crises before they happen.

If I hadn’t been raised in a Sanctuary parish, if I hadn’t gone to Ghana, it’s very likely I wouldn’t have any clue the degree of the refugee problem in the world – or the incredible vulnerability these people face. And all over our country – including in St. Louis – refugees who have been fortunate enough to have made it through the Herculean resettlement process face enormous challenges integrating into society and functioning even on a subsistence level.

And yet they are right there in our communities – and they are a gift to the rest of the Body. They are a gift for what they bring to the table as the people of God. They are a gift for their stories and experiences – stories that can open our ears, eyes and hearts to the lives of people who are invisible to the world. Stories that can help us wake up to the call the Archbishop of Canterbury drew out of scripture for us – a call to create a world where nobody is invisible.