Vicki's View

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

2011-11-30T16:39:00.001-08:00

"What do they want?" my vicar asked, looking over at me on the deacon's bench, knowing my involvement with Occupy. My response – during the Prayers of the People – was "We pray for a society that is fair and just and loving." In the faith setting of a church service such an answer, I felt, was not only appropriate, but profoundly simple and manifestly clear – we seek a society that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God, the Beloved Community we all profess to strive for, just as we seek forgiveness for the unfair, unjust, and mean-spirited society we have created.

But that may have been an inappropriate and/or inadequate answer to a wrong question.

First, its pronoun is wrong. The proper question is "What do we want?" Are we not the 99%? Do we not want to convince even the 1% to join a new, more humane consensus? Do we not have eyes and ears and hearts to see and hear and feel what Stephane Hessel calls the "unbearable things all around us" – the myriad injustices and indignities heaped upon us by out-of-control capitalism and a democracy corrupted by money. Must we rely on the courageous campers who have opened our eyes to those unbearable things to also fill our minds, grown flaccid, with ready-made answers? Have we not minds of our own? Can we not engage? Can we not exert ourselves, and, through such exertion, tone up our capacity to think for ourselves and, together, shape our answers…the answers we need, we seek, and, yes, want. As Hessel writes in Time for Outrage, "The worst attitude is indifference."

And we have been indifferent for a long time – for more than forty years – as our political and economic system, our liberal, enlightened civilization, our sense of self have been warped beyond recognition. Against this background, that "What do they want?" is a wrong question in that it is premature. It attempts to leapfrog the necessary prefatory question: "How did we get here?" The answer to that question is perforce long and complex. It must, however, be tackled, if we are to find our way forward. For starters, consider this long excerpt from The Coming Insurrection, an already-four-year-old analysis by France's "Invisible Committee" (Why must they always be French?). It is a little book being read by our American youth.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of

its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had

to deny itself as a class in order to permit the boureoisification of

society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital

had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself

as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital

in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice

itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as

a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the

West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to

impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be

summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself

as a content in order to survive as a form.

The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the

"spiritual" technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives by

attributing to women all the worst attributes of men: willfulness,

self-control, insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by

propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment. So it

goes with all the great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining

themselves through artifices that contradict these fictions point by

point.

There is no "clash of civilizations." There is a clinically dead

Civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that

spread a peculiar plague into the planet's atmosphere. At this

point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own "values,"

and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a

provocation….

We have thus arrived at a dark place – not Orwell's 1984 with its ubiquitous overt oppression by force, but rather Huxley's Brave New World where we sleep walk through life, numbed by drugs and distracted by the bread-and-circus of infotainment. As the Invisible Committee says "The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within that reality that we must choose sides."

The campers of Zucotti Park, Frank Ogawa Plaza, Justin Herman Plaza, Berkeley and Davis have chosen sides. They have chosen the "impudent act," the provocation, the shouted "Wake up!" And now it's time for the rest of us to choose – to wake up or continue sleep walking.

Finally, my vicar's question and my attempt at a prayerful response are also both wrong in that they talk past each other. The question seeks not the campers' statement of the problem, its genesis, or the proffered vision. It seeks rather – in typically pragmatic American fashion – a program, a statement of concrete steps forward. As such, it is a question that is a source of hope…that, at last, we are waking up…that, having been provoked, we have begun the search for answers. It is a search that can bear fruit if we engage in it together – not just the campers, not just the 99%, but all of us; if we base it on a solid understanding on where we've been and how we got here; and, if we keep our eyes on the prize – a fairer, more humane society, a democracy in which all voices are equal, capitalism with a human face…that Beloved Community, if you will.

We must also realize that we are but at the very beginning of a long process that can still go wrong… if we lose heart or interest. We are at a pivotal moment in a movement that is barely two months old. First they ignored us, then they laughed at us ("Get a job…after you take a bath."), now they're fighting us – the drumbeat on Fox, the police violence on campuses, the orchestrated raids on the camps. As I write this, Occupy San Francisco stands in precarious isolation. But this is not about camps, it is about ideas. It is not about tents, it is about people. The tents are being torn down, but the people are still standing. We are not scattering. We are coming together around the ideas, seeking to put the flesh of action on the bones that are their animating spirit.

I have taken part in several such seminars in San Francisco…in the middle of Market Street, in general assemblies on Justin Herman Plaza, in a Catholic church, in a Friends meeting house. Others have elsewhere. A week ago, Michael Moore attended one such meeting with more than forty Occupy Wall Street activists. They produced a consensus vision statement and Moore proposed a list of "10 Things We Want," ranging from single-payer health care and the rescinding of the Bush tax cuts for the rich to constitutional amendments removing money from the electoral process and stripping corporations of their "personhood" (http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/where-does-occupy-wall-street-go-here). The OWS General Assembly will consider these proposals and others may find in them a worthy nucleus for further discussion.

Seek out such discussions. Take part. Engage. As the Invisible Committee said four years ago, "To go on waiting is madness." And, as Michael Moore said last week, "Don't sit this one out." Next time someone asks you "What do they want?" be prepared to respond with what we want. Who knows, there may yet be an American Spring.

THE SAVIORS OF GOD

2011-11-24T12:50:00.001-08:00

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote that, in this harsh, harsh world despoiled by greedy "elites," "Christ wanders about hungry and homeless, that He is in danger, and that now it is His turn to be saved by man." And, one has the sense, this Thanksgiving week, that it is the church's turn – the turn of its aging, cautious, guardians, some of whom may have forgotten last Sunday's Gospel – to be saved by young people, who may not realize they're Christians, but, nonetheless, have remembered…and, as we're wont to say, inwardly digested Matthew 25.

In their caution and amnesia, those we look to for ecclesial leadership have been slow to speak or act…lest they offend. It takes money to maintain those buildings. And, so, they keep their silence, forgetting – or looking away from - so much recent history…when silence killed. They seem to have forgotten the lament of Leo Baeck, the leader of Germany's Jewish Community from 1933 to 1943 – "Nothing is so sad as silence;" or that of Stephane Hessel, the French Resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor, writing of today's indignities and inequality – "The worst attitude is indifference;" or Martin's j'accuse – "There is a time when silence is betrayal."

That time has come again. And, in the face of the suffocating silence and indifference, the young people of America and the world have taken to the streets to stand in dignity and voice a cry that can no longer be stifled – "Enough!" We've heard it in the canyons of Chiapas – "Basta!" We've heard in Tahrir Square - that place named "Liberty" – "Kefeya!" And now we hear it on our own streets - from Zucotti Park to Justin Herman Plaza - Enough! Enough of the self-serving greed; the indignities heaped on God's people; the despoliation of God's creation; the worship of that false god, the golden calf of an amoral, uncaring, unfettered "Market;" the endless wars that devour our youth, our treasure, our souls; the lies and manipulation that mock our intelligence and feed our outrage; a silent church of too many buildings and not enough people.

But the people are there. They always are. They're on the street and doing church in new ways that are very old. They don't ask "Lord, when did we see you hungry?" They feed the hungry. And the unseen God smiles. They break bread together – sometimes a long Italian loaf, a thin pita, or thinner taco – and pass the cup - grape juice, perhaps, for those struggling with addictions. They hold hands in growing circles of protection to say together the Lord's Prayer and sing - with feeling not felt in any building - "Amazing Grace" and "We Shall Overcome." And, on a trolley track on Market Street, they light some candles and sit in silence…not knowing what will come, but prepared and free of fear.

"This," as Josh Griffin, a young priest in Portland, said, "is not a protest movement, it is public liturgy of the finest sort. This movement is powerful because it is showing us a way forward." In their disparate voices, in terms that should speak to Christians, the young people of Occupy have decried an unfair, often inhumane system. And, now, with clear vision and engaged minds, they are beginning the task of formulating the concrete goals and objectives the cognoscenti mockingly clamor for. They will lead the "leaders" and show them the way out of this morally bankrupt cul-de-sac into which they have led us…and left us. They will, indeed, show us the way forward. And, if those of us in our comfortable churches will follow…out the doors of our aging buildings…to where God's people are huddled in their pain, their fear, and yearning, we – together - may save the good name of God.

"Mike Check!"

2011-10-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hearing that Thursday night's general assembly at Occupy San Francisco would center on Scott Olsen, the young Marine veteran critically injured (probably by a tear gas canister) in Oakland Tuesday night, I made it a point to end my day at that meeting on Justin Herman Plaza.

The evening began - as usual - at Open Cathedral at 16^th and Mission with an unusually moving service attended by twenty or so regulars, our faithful ushers from the Tenderloin, the Rev. Lee Anne Reat and her husband from St. John's Episcopal Church in Columbus, Ohio (streetchurchacrossamerica.blogspot.com), and – God, hiding again behind her serendipity – Randy from Occupy San Francisco who joined our growing circle for the Lord's Prayer and for Communion.

After the service, I filled a shopping bag with bananas and tortillas at the market across the street and headed for the Ferry Building. The general assembly was just starting. Remembering from Monday where the food tent was, I joined the line and emptied the bag on the serving table. A little girl – maybe five - delighted in a banana. I said "Hi!' to her single-parent mom and pet their tiny dog.

All the while, I could hear the stream of announcements from the bull horn and the repeated "Mike check!" from each person moving forward to speak to the bowl-shaped crowd of intent, well-behaved youngsters who mixed comfortably with those joining after work in their suits, cellphones in hand.

We learned about the meeting in the mayor's office; the joint undertaking to tend to sanitary conditions (standing next to the dishwashing area, I couldn't help but smile); the "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions; news that Occupy Wall Street was marching to honor Scott Olsen; the desire to re-name Justin Herman Plaza and Varney Alley, the latter to Veterans' Alley and the former to anything other than the name of the former head of the despised Re-Development Land Agency; and the plans for Saturday's big march. It all unfolded in an orderly democratic fashion, with each speaker grasping the mike of the bullhorn held by someone else and beginning with an oft-repeated shout - "Mike check!"

Someone standing next to me asked after "the minister from the Mission with the long black hair…yes, Monique." "Will she come here?" I replied that I was sure she would, having just come from a service in the Mission with her. I, then, asked the young lady taking notes in front of me whether I too could make an "announcement" to the assembly. "Sure, get on Maria's lineup of speakers."

I made my way to Maria. She asked my name and I was handed the mike. I had been there long enough to understand the cadence – short bursts repeated "amen corner"- style by the crowd to ensure that everyone heard the message.

I began…"Mike check!...My name's Vicki…I'm here tonight to say…[pointing at my collar]we've heard you…and they've heard us…I'm here to wish you Shalom…not the silence of the graveyard…but the true peace of justice…No justice, no peace!...the peace of truly shared prosperity…We are with you!"

And from the smiles, "amens," and high-fives as I melted back into the crowd, I knew that we were, indeed, with each other…that clergy were numbered among the 99% and most welcome in the movement.

I'm back in Vallejo. It's late. Bed beckons…and I can pray with added meaning at the end of a meaningful day:

            Lord,
            it is night.

            The night is for stillness.
            Let us be still in the presence of God.

            It is night after a long day.
            What has been done has been done;
            what has not been done has not been done;
            let it be.

            The night is dark;
            Let our fears of the darkness of the world and our own lives rest in you.

            The night is quiet.
            Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
            all dear to us,
            and all who have no peace.

            The night heralds the dawn.
            Let us look expectantly to a new day,
            new joys,
            new possibilities.

            In your name we pray.
            Amen.

A CALL TO SHALOM

2011-10-24T20:36:00.001-07:00

"No justice! No peace!" "No justice! No peace!" We have heard the cry at countless demonstrations. It is a plea not for the mere absence of violence, the silent, complacent peace of the graveyard. It is, rather, a call to the peace of Shalom that rests on justice and that encompasses a shared sense of well-being in the community.

For too long now that sense of justice and shared well-being has eluded us. We have experienced forty years of endless war – overlapping, futile, and, for the most part, unworthy wars…wars that have left us mired in Afghanistan and facing perceived enemies on every continent. We are suffering the consequence of decades of rampant greed and reckless risk-taking that have produced a Great Recession in an America we hardly recognize any more.

And the powers-that-be of this world stand athwart the need for change - banks that gambled with our savings and took our homes, corporations that export our jobs, politicians who spout focus-group tested one-liners and fiddle while a nation burns, a corporate media that would distract us from the fire with daily offerings of circus-like "infotainment." The results are an income inequality not seen since 1928, in which 40 percent of the nation's wealth is held by one percent of our people; real unemployment near 16 percent; an increasingly less progressive tax system unworthy of a civilized society; rampant cuts in programs for the suffering among us; a people on its knees.

No wonder, at this moment of crisis, that the national mood is one of fear, the worst fear being that we might not be up to the task – an "uneasy feeling," a "sinking feeling," as the erstwhile New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it, "that important opportunities are slipping from the nation's grasp." We are, he said, "squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society," adding, "If America can't change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue."

Indeed it will…if we don't change. But we have had our cold shower. Our eyes are wide open. We are poised to act. Our hour has come. We dare not squander this opportunity to build a better society. As people of faith and as Americans, we are a people of hope. We must give voice to our longings and aspirations. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said about a war, "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come again in America. We are at another moment when silence is betrayal. Our old ways of doing things no longer work. We must find new ways…new ways that reflect our faith in God and our concern for one another.

As people of faith we must now speak truth to power – in Wall Street and Washington – and stand in solidarity with those in the Occupy movement who seek a more equitable society. We are mindful that we are called, in the words of Micah "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" and strengthened in the struggle by the promise of Jesus that "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."

Mindful also, as Walter Rauschenbusch said, that such righteousness is "not a matter of getting of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming life on earth into the harmony of heaven," we must insist that "the highest type of goodness is that which puts freely at the service of the community all that man is and can be" and that conversely, "the highest type of badness is that which uses up the wealth and happiness and virtue of the community to please self."

As people of faith, we must seek a seat at the table and help shape solutions consistent with our values of justice, equality, charity, and solidarity with our fellow human beings. We must not shy from the political fray, for both politics and religion concern themselves with social relationships, how we relate to one another, how we will shape our societies. And good politics, like good religion, seeks to shape a just society.

Finally, we must be diligent in the effort and impatient with those who would temporize. In the words of Dr. King, "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy."

Only when we redeem that promise will we enjoy the true peace of Shalom.

A CHILD'S VIEW FROM GAZA

2011-09-29T09:11:00.001-07:00

Professor Bernard Lewis, of Princeton, takes the view that Israel must win its struggle in the United States and it must have the support of American public opinion.

Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (1976)

And, by 1976, Israel had won this struggle in the United States. Since 1960, the dominant narrative about Israel's "struggle" in the United States was that of Otto Preminger's adaptation of Leon Uris' "Exodus" – Paul Newman's Ari, a tanned and arrogant veteran of Britain's Jewish Brigade, and John Derek's Taha, an obsequious throwaway "Arab." And, in academia, the facts of the struggle between Jew and Palestinian were, for decades, filtered through the lens of orientalists like Lewis.

That narrative is still dominant…at least in the United States. But even Americans are beginning to hear and listen to another narrative…of Palestinians and the reality of life…and death…in today's Israel/Palestine.

The pain and urgency of that long-suppressed narrative broke through on our television screens during Israel's Christmas 2008 assault on Gaza, known euphemistically by the sanitized code name "Cast Lead." There was no way of sanitizing the real-time images of that assault that killed 1,300 Gazans, half of them women and children.

Nor was there any way to sanitize the blood-red images of dying children contained in Eyes on Gaza, a narrative by Norwegian surgeon Mads Gilbert of that winter 2008/09 in Gaza's al Shifah Hospital, or the psychological trauma visited upon the children that survived (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqGJytyz7w4 ).

No longer were the Palestinians the cardboard cutout terrorists of our one-sided view of reality. They were living, breathing…dying human beings just like us, just like the Israelis. They were beginning to be heard.

And, thanks to people like Berkeley's Barbara Lubin and Ziad Abbas, Oakland's Nancy Hernandez, and, most especially, Susan Johnson, a 70-year-old grandmother from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the Middle East Children's Alliance (www.mecaforpeace.org/), in collaboration with Afaq Jadeeda's (New Horizons) Center, organized the "Let the Children Play and Heal" project to enable the children of Gaza to work through their trauma through art.

Through its Maia Project, MECA is also working in partnership with community organizations in Gaza to build water purification and desalination units in schools throughout the Gaza Strip. And, as part of this latter effort, Ms. Hernandez provided the children there paints and crayons and colors they hadn't seen in their young gray lives. She asked them to draw their visions of water and they gave her pictures of black tanks atop their houses – tanks that hold the one-or-two-hours-a-week of water allowed each Gaza household. And then they started drawing other visions of their reality – of the death, destruction, fear, and deprivation that have been their lot.

These healing strands came together in a remarkable collection - "A Child's View from Gaza" – that was to have been displayed this fall at Oakland's Museum of Children's Art (MOCHA).

But the children's art was seen as a threat by the guardians of the dominant narrative. Pressured by the Jewish Federation of the East Bay and the San Francisco JCRC, MOCHA pulled the plug on the exhibit. Far from seeking to cover its role, the Federation trumpeted its glee. "Great news!" it proclaimed. "The 'Child's View From Gaza' exhibit at MOCHA has been canceled thanks to some great East Bay Jewish community organizing."

Irony of ironies, however, this crude exercise of censorship unleashed a national outcry, opening yet further the national media doors to the alternative narrative of the long-oppressed, long-silenced Palestinian people. The pictures of Gaza's children became a cause celebre from coast to coast. Their voices were amplified.

And, on September 24, hundreds attended the opening of the exhibit – in MOCHA's courtyard where dozens of us served as human easels, each holding a child's work of art in respectful silence. A short march brought the throng around the corner to an alternative venue at 917 Washington (at 10^th) where a good time was had by all despite the never-say-die protests of the would-be censors (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8mHw2-aZQ&feature=youtu.be). The exhibit will welcome visitors there through November.

Won't you come visit, come look? Won't you use your feet, your eyes to challenge those who would censor what you can see, what the children of Gaza can say?

TO FORGIVE...AND FORGET? A SERMON ON SEPTEMBER 11

2011-09-28T17:57:00.001-07:00

Forgive us our trespasses, as we

forgive those who trespass against us

Good morning. Remembering the date, many of you are probably thinking "What's so good about it?" Remembering the date, aren't I supposed to ask "Where were you this morning ten years ago?" But, didn't we do that last year? Didn't I tell you where I was? Where my niece was in lower Manhattan? Didn't you think about where you were…and perhaps try to forget? Another year's gone by, a decade now. Have you been able to forget? To forgive? Do you want to? To forgive? To forget?

Today's Gospel is incredibly simple, but, oh, so hard. How simple? We are called to forgive…not once, not twice, not seven times, but, Jesus tells us, seventy-seven times…infinitely…always…every time. And how are we to forgive? We are to forgive as we would wish to be forgiven, as we need to be forgiven, as we pray to be forgiven: "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

That passage of the Lord's Prayer, our prayer to our Father, has various wordings. In one, our "trespasses" become "debts" and, no matter the version, refer to sins. And, in today's Gospel, Jesus uses the debt analogy – an analogy those of us in this money-obsessed twenty-first century might especially understand. He turns those words from his prayer to his father into a parable…as if to say "Do you get it now?" It is a parable that can be understood in the nine little words from that prayer: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

Simple right?

Simple? Have you ever had to forgive someone who raped your daughter…like Tracy Dugard's parents? Someone who killed your brother…or mom or dad… some drunken driver on I-80, some faceless fighter in Afghanistan or Kurdistan? Then, there are those anger-crazed fanatics who drove three planes into three buildings and another into the ground…and killed three thousand of our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. Have you forgiven them? Can you? And what if the three thousand had been six million? What if you were a Jew? What if one of the six million had been your mom or dad? What if you had been in one of those death camps and survived? Could you forgive the German…the "Christian"…who pulled the trigger…or mindlessly opened the gas spigot?

For me, these are not academic questions that I studied in some seminary. They are questions that I've lived. For three years, I lived in Krakow, Poland…an hour from Auschwitz. I've walked that awful railroad track. I've peered into the ovens…and swear I could smell the stench of death. And, in Krakow 's old ghetto, I met the few survivors – a thousand of once a hundred thousand - and talked with them of those who hadn't survived. And later, I lived in Munich, the place Hitler called the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, the capital of the Nazi movement…a stone's throw from Dachau. There, I met many good Germans who resisted Hitler, some who may have survived with a wounded conscience, and, perhaps, more than one of the killers, survivors of another sort…the Murderers among Us that the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote about.

But today I'd like to talk about another book by Wiesenthal – The Sunflower. The first half of the book is a powerful parable on the "possibilities and limits of forgiveness." It relates a tale about Wiesenthal's time as a prisoner orderly in an SS hospital in Lvov in western Ukraine. There - alone in a hospital room - he encounters, Karl, a blinded, horribly burned German. The dying SS man, a lapsed Roman Catholic, summons Wiesenthal to his side and insists that he hear his confession…a graphic recitation of the hundreds of Jews he has killed. He begs for Wiesenthal's hand, his forgiveness. It is the German's final hope for atonement. Wiesenthal leaves the room in silence, withholding that forgiveness – a non-act that haunts Wiesenthal the rest of his life. And we are left to struggle with the question posed on the cover of the book: "What would you do?"

Again, it all seems sooo simple. Some of us, fingering perhaps the "WWJD" on some rubber bracelet, would confidently pose another question: "What would Jesus do?" Of course, he'd forgive the dying murderer. Didn't he forgive his own killers? Of course, he'd forgive the terrorist, shouting his "Allah u Ahkba," as he flew his plane into the 82^nd floor. Wouldn't he say again: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing?" Of course, he would.

But that's the wrong question. The proper question, the one we're asked today is: What would Jesus have us do…in our imperfections, with our limitations, with our lust for vengeance? That's a much harder question. And the answer is nowhere near as certain.

In The Sunflower, the question on the cover of the book becomes the stuff of a symposium that is the second half of the book. It becomes the question that more than forty leaders of the faith and moral community – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and non-believers – are called to grapple with – "What would you do?"

It is a question I've grappled with over a long lifetime, as I've contemplated the words of Jesus, the reflections in The Sunflower, and real life situations that have challenged me to give and to seek forgiveness. It is a question we all grapple with again this morning as we consider – perhaps for the first time in a long time - the events of September 11, our reactions to them, and what Jesus would have us do in their wake. As we do, let me share some random thoughts from my own struggle with this question of giving and seeking forgiveness.

First, there is the matter of perspective. Jesus draws our attention to it in today's parable in terms of dollars and cents…or talents and denarii. It's no accident that here the one who owes ten thousand talents – an impossible sum to repay, since one talent was tantamount to fifteen years' wages – is unwilling to forgive the debt of a fellow slave who owed but a hundred denarii or three months' wages. Were he to rephrase this as a parable, not on debts, but on deaths - deaths visited on one another from the sky - might not Jesus ask us, as we pray in our sorrow for the 3,000 dead of September 11, also to mourn - if just silently - the 6,000 killed in Baghdad's "shock and awe," the 25,000 in Dresden, the 50,000 in the fire raids on Hamburg, the 90,000 in the fire raids on Tokyo, and the 200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we have sought and received forgiveness for 300,000 such deaths from a merciful God, can we not find it in our hearts to forgive those who killed 3,000 of our kinfolk? Do we really mean it, when we pray "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive who trespass against us?"

This is not to put human lives in the same category as debts measured in talents and denarii, dollars and cents, or any numbers…nor to place those lives on some perverse scales that value one of ours as a hundred of theirs. No, each life is infinitely valuable…to God and to us. Just as some among us may mourn the death of an individual friend or family member who died on September 11, so, too, there are Afghanis and Iraqis who mourn someone they love who died since then. There was a rabbi who said "If you take one life, you kill all mankind." And to do that is profoundly evil.

And, make no mistake about it, what happened on 9/11 was profoundly evil. If, in working for the Kingdom of God, we seek to usher in God's heaven on earth, those who steered those planes into the World Trade Center opened the gates of hell; they loosed hell on earth. What is hell? Consider those people on the 102^nd floor – the waiters at Windows on the World, the brokers at Cantor Fitzgerald, the janitors – unable to breathe the black smoke, the flames licking at their backs, holding hands in a last act of human solidarity…and leaping – willfully, courageously – to their deaths, hoping perhaps to wake up in heaven. I have no doubt, however, that, for one excruciating moment, they experienced all the pain of hell for all the eternity that is in a moment.

But, even if we're inclined to forgive such horror, is it within our power to do so? Some in The Sunflower discussion think not. Wiesenthal himself says he could not forgive the SS-man, because his were not crimes committed against Wiesenthal personally, but against others. Eva Fleischner, another Jew, agrees, pointing out that the Lord's Prayer says "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us," not, she adds, "those who trespass against others." And, according to the great Rabbi Abraham Heschel, no one can forgive crimes committed against other people by other people. "It is," he says, "therefore preposterous to assume that anybody alive can extend forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million people who perished." Or, one might add, the three thousand who died on September 11^th.

Heschel goes one step further, citing Jewish tradition that "even God himself can only forgive sins against himself not against man"….to which Matthew Fox, an Episcopal priest, adds that "no one had appointed Simon to forgive in God's name." But Father Theodore Hesburgh, then president emeritus of Notre Dame, disagrees: "My whole instinct is to forgive. Perhaps that is because I am a Catholic priest. In a sense, I am in the forgiving business….Of course, the sin here is monumental. It is still finite and God's mercy is infinite. If asked to forgive, by anyone for anything, I would forgive because God would forgive."

So would I. I'm a Christian. And, we, too, are in the forgiving business.

I would also question the line Fleischner so crisply, so simply draws between "us" and "others" in dissecting the Lord's Prayer. For neither does it say "Forgive me my trespasses, as I forgive those who trespass against me." Who, I would ask, do we understand as "us," as "we," in the context of the Holocaust, September 11, the Lord's Prayer? Was the Holocaust a crime only against those killed…or against all Jews, dead and alive? Did the hijackers of September 11 seek only to kill three thousand or to instill a crippling fear in the hearts of all Americans? And when crimes of such magnitude are committed against anyone anywhere, are they not crimes against us all in our shared humanity. I've said it again and again. Let me say it once more: We find our salvation, not in solitude, but in community.

But, why forgive? What's in it for us…to make easier our journey together through this life, toward salvation? In forgiving, Jesus tells us, we heap coals upon the heads of our enemies. But, think about it, isn't that a form of vengeance, of passive aggression? Is that sufficient motive forgiving? But, think also of the obverse – withholding our forgiveness. When we do not forgive, do we not heap coals upon our own heads? Do we not allow our pain, our hurt, our sense of victimhood, to fester, to grow, and eventually explode in some self-defeating act of violence? In doing so, do we not allow our fears and anger to drive out our hopes and dreams? Do we not allow our dreams to become our worst nightmares? Listen to Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Isn't that what happened after 9/11? Didn't we allow our fear and anger to drive out our hopes and dreams, our better spirits…to explode in the paroxysm of violence that has marked the last decade? Didn't we choose vengeance over forgiveness? Didn't we close our eyes to the words of Paul from just two weeks ago – "Do not repay anyone evil for evil….never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine'….Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good?"

And, in choosing vengeance, didn't we allow a dozen dead terrorists to heap coals on our heads – two wars, two and three times longer than World War II; two wars that have resulted in more dead young Americans than were killed on September 11; many tens of thousands of families dealing with the life-altering wounds of battle; hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghanis and millions more who hate us for killing their brothers and sisters; six trillion dollars mindlessly squandered on all the killing; an economy in shambles; our ostracism of the vulnerable Other; the endemic fear that paralyzes. Are these not also trespasses for which we should seek the forgiveness of millions of faceless strangers? Are they not debts for which we need seek forgiveness from our children and our generations as yet unborn? Are they not sins for which we must seek forgiveness from God?

If we are to find such forgiveness, if we are to live together - perpetrators and victims - in a peaceful present, we must break free of the cycle of violence that holds us in its thrall. And, that requires facing the sometimes hard truths that must precede reconciliation. Such remembrance, thoughtfully embraced, can yield remarkable reconciliation, as it has in South Africa, Chile, and post-communist Europe. When, however, the truth of past injustice is swept under the rug – as in the former Yugoslavia, in Israel/Palestine, or pre-1960s America – it produces the sorts of explosions Langston Hughes had so very much in mind.

No, forgiveness does not mean forgetting. We are called, rather, to remember…to never forget the sting of the pain and the injustice visited upon us… so that we do not visit it upon others. Jews, in particular, have been called to remember the Exodus we have been recalling these many weeks and again this morning…to remember that they – that we - were once slaves in Egypt, to remember to be hospitable to the fellow sojourners in our midst. And, in remembering the horrors of the Holocaust, they and we are all called to live into the meaning of those two words – Never again! Never again…not for us…or anyone.

It is a vow that is being sorely tested in the Holy Land this very week as Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims confront yet another round in the seemingly unending tit-for-tat, eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth cycle of violence. It is a situation that cries to heaven for mutual forgiveness, for justice, reconciliation, and peace.

In a few minutes, we will add our voices to that cry, that rising prayer, as we place this tiny dove of peace on our altar and light its flame of olive oil from the hills of Ephraim that offered Jesus refuge in another time of strife.

As we do so, on this somber anniversary, let us seize this moment as the "opportunity for reflection" that Katharine, our Presiding Bishop has called us to. "Have we become," she asks, "more effective reconcilers as a result? Are we more committed to peace-making?" "The greatest memorial to those who died ten years ago," she says, "will be a world more inclined toward peace." "What, she asks, "are you doing to build a living memorial like that?"

To Katharine's question, to those of Simon Wiesenthal, of Langston Hughes, of that silent voice in your heart this morning, let me add, let me close, with just one more…from a drunken driver beaten senseless beside a Los Angeles Freeway. In the wake of the acquittal of his attackers, in the midst of the riots that had already taken thirty-five lives, a bewildered, tearful Rodney King asked: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?...It's just not right. It's not right. It's not…."

THE "REAL" FUTURE FOR CHRISTIANS IN THE HOLY LAND

2011-07-29T09:10:00.001-07:00

In mid-July some 90 religious, political, and media representatives gathered at London's Lambeth Palace at the behest of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, to discuss in conference the situation of Christians in the Holy Land.

The purpose, according to Archbishop Williams, was to raise "literate, compassionate awareness" of the plight of Palestinian Christians in light of the "very significant" and "accelerating" decline of their population and to consider "What we can we do to help those Christians who so urgently want to stay in their homeland, and to imagine a future there for themselves?"

The conference followed closely on the heels of a mid-June BBC interview, in which Williams spoke of Palestinian Christians as a minority in a largely Muslim population and, with no mention of the effects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, attributed the Christian exodus solely to Muslim extremism. This led the Rev. Naim Ateek, the director of Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, to write the archbishop to point out that "as Palestinian Christians, we perceive ourselves as an integral part of the Palestinian people ... [and] do not refer to ourselves as a minority."

Ateek noted, moreover, that "as Palestinians, whether Christian or Muslim, we equally live under the oppression of the illegal Israeli occupation of our country." This was reiterated at the conference by Samer Makhlouf, a Roman Catholic, who reportedly called the occupation "the father of all problems in the region." (See John Allen's report in the National Catholic Reporter.)

Others at the conference tried to draw attention to the specifics of those problems… the sorts of hardships I have seen firsthand visiting Palestinian Christians in late 2008 and again this March. These effects are most clearly evident in Taybeh, the only entirely Christian village in Palestine, whose economic livelihood is threatened by the settlements and military outposts that surround it, and Bethlehem, whose many Christians are cut off from Jerusalem by the thirty-foot high separation wall and a tightening ring of settlements, including the veritable cities of Gilo and Har Homa. At the Christian-run Bethlehem University, for example, students with Jerusalem identity cards described the daily hassle they must endure at Israeli checkpoints, while those with West Bank papers complained about their complete inability to visit the holy sites -- or relatives -- in Jerusalem.

No wonder the population of Christians in Israel/Palestine has stagnated, growing only from about 150,000 in 1946 to fewer than 160,000 in 2006 rather than the far higher figure that might be expected from natural demographic growth. As the Palestinian Christian academic Bernard Sabellah noted, according to Allen, this stagnation is accounted for by the "missing" Christians who have emigrated.

Almost amusingly, Rabbi Daniel Sperber of Tel Aviv's Bar-Ilan University reportedly told the conference not to worry … "the churches are full" thanks to Filipino guest workers and 50,000 Christians who have immigrated from the former Soviet Union. These latter "Christians," he failed to note, are for the most part Soviet "Jews" who have made aliyah to Israel and brought with them racist, fascist attitudes that have given rise to neo-Soviet policies that would discriminate against Palestinians and Filipinos alike and, in the process, threaten Israeli democracy.

So, to return to Archbishop William's pregnant question, "What we can we do to help those Christians who so urgently want to stay in their homeland, and to imagine a future there for themselves?"

For the most part, the archbishop and others danced around the "realities on the ground" -- realities made worse each day by the bulldozers that daily create thousands of new illegal settlements, home now to half a million Israeli Jews on the West Bank -- preferring instead to talk of "balance," as if a confrontation between Israel's behemoth military machine and a people on its knees could ever be "balanced" -- and bottoms-up grassroots "constructive engagement;" the sort of "constructive engagement" engaged in by the Episcopal Church since 2002.

To what effect, one has to ask? According to Canon Robert Edmunds, chaplain to Suheil Dawani, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem, such an approach risks ending in "words and goodwill" that don't change the lived reality of Palestinian Christians. They are, he said, but "band-aids," adding that "if we don't encourage the government of Israel to cut a deal, we're going to be putting on band-aids for a very long time."

It is far past time not just to encourage, but to insist that the government of Israel cut the two-state deal demanded not just by justice but by the best interests of Israel. It is time for the Episcopal Church to consider and adopt a policy that will get the attention of the governments of Israel -- and the United States -- a policy of divesting from all companies that enable the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and boycotting all products manufactured in Israeli settlements in the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

The bleeding Palestinian Christians -- indeed, all Palestinians -- deserve not just our words, prayers, goodwill, and conferences. They are not just some object of abstract historicity and, therefore, in the eyes of our archbishop, "critical to Christianity's identity." They are living, breathing, bleeding human beings whose dignity we are called by our baptism to respect.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The above appeared on Episcopal News Service July 28, 2011

SCENES FROM A DEMONSTRATION

2011-07-06T21:59:00.001-07:00

Tuesday's demonstration at San Francisco's Israeli Consulate General was hastily called (by Code Pink), precipitated by the physical sabotage and legal wrangling deployed by Israel against the boats of the Gaza Flotilla detained in Greek ports. For my part, I was even more outraged by our State Department's warnings, not to the Israelis who might use violence against the boats, but to the Americans on them...to cease and desist.

Arriving at the consulate about five, we were two, maybe three dozen, a similar number of Israel supporters on the other side of the consulate entrance. They had a megaphone (which we did not) and sang a few songs in Hebrew. Across the street, a police officer watched from his car and, on the corner, a familiar, nattily-suited skinhead – probably Mossad.

I brought my Palestinian flag and there were a few others, one large sign, and some small "Free Gaza" and "Let the Boats Sail" signs. I had toyed with bringing my large "Episcopalians for Peace" sign and, in retrospect was glad I hadn't. It takes two Episcopalians to hold it. I made it a point, however, to wear my clerical garb.

Already by 5:30 we were running out of flyers. Nancy McFarlane took my flag to wave, while I went to a Fed Ex a block away, returning with 200 more flyers, most of which were handed out before we dispersed.

The response of passersby and those in cars was quite positive. More than one pedestrian said "I'm glad you're here," as he or she accepted the flyer. And there were plenty of honking horns, "V" signs, and thumbs up from passing drivers. One has the impression that the narrative has changed. The Palestinian story is getting through.

On the negative side, the pro-Israeli group was aggressive and combative and frankly full of hate they were all too willing to share, as they mingled in with our group, seeking to provoke untoward reactions and taking pictures right and left. Their main themes seemed to be "You're anti-Semites" and - one directed to me over and over - "Jesus was a Jew." My responses varied - from "Yes, that he was, but, oh, so much more" to "I don't think God has a denomination." Adding to the latter once a reference to Desmond Tutu's new book God Is Not a Christian, I was greeted with the retort "Oh that guy, a notorious anti-Semite."

I asked more than one of the pro-Israeli demonstrators to stay with their group on the south side of aqn invisible line in the interest of a peaceful evening and suggested to the police officer that he keep the two groups apart. He finally intervened when some of the pro-Israeli crowd drifted back into our midst, chalking over the chalked slogan our members had written on the sidewalk.

Though I met one civil and very pleasant pro-Israeli demonstrator (She wanted me to know her name was Robin.), their generally pugnacious behavior was a real turn-off, causing me to question the utility of any further attempts at dialogue. As I was leaving, I ran into a "friend" from social justice marches with CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), a black female rabbi. Addressing her with a smile as "Rabbi," I gave her a hug amidst the blue and white flags, my Palestinian flag still in one hand. She rebuffed me with a look that was a cross between disgust and contempt. It hurt.

The contempt, however, was unalloyed in the attitudes of the three people I encountered at the entrance to the consulate – a man, a woman, and a twenty-something who appeared to be the woman's daughter. Pointing angrily at the olive-wood cross around my neck, the woman snarled "What does that say? 'Jesus, Lord?' Don't you know Jesus was a Jew?" At which point, the man turned on me, raising his voice "You couldn't wear that in Palestine. You'd be killed!" I responded simply, "I bought it in Palestine…in March," and then attempted to educate the three of them about the fact that there are many thousands of Palestinian Christians. The woman, her flag draped over her shoulders like a prayer shawl, would have none of it. She interrupted "I can't tell. Are you a man or a woman?" End of conversation. Returning her smirk with my own silent and unworthy look of contempt, I walked away in guilt and sadness to fight the sprouting seeds of anti-Semitism.

I don't like how that feels and know I must keep fighting. I will, but, God, Israel is making it hard…for me and for Jews, my sisters, brothers, friends.

A MOMENT OF MORAL AND POLITICAL ACCOUNTING

2011-07-04T11:30:00.001-07:00

As she prepares to leave for Gaza on the Audacity of Hope, Alice Walker has written eloquently of Gandhi and King; of Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/21/alice.walker.gaza/)...and of the power of standing with non-violent dignity for justice.

That is the stance of Jesus Christ - to turn the other cheek and, in doing so, to change the heart of those swinging the hand…or wielding the trunchion or gun. It is, however, a stance, a method, that only works if one's oppressor has a moral core that can be appealed to, a heart that can be opened.

Gandhi triumphed, because his oppressors - the British - were shamed by their own Magna Charta and an in-grained sense of fairness. Martin triumphed, because he forced us to realize how great the gap had grown between our professed ideals - the American Creed - and the reality of our daily lives. Hitler and Stalin, however, had no such moral core to appeal to and gunned down with ease those who opposed them.

And, Jesus, too, was killed by a Roman Empire that feared only the sword; by a Judaism, the heart of which had so calcified, that it could not be cracked open; and, yes, by the similarly calcified Christianity of today.

In the current situation, as another Gaza Flotilla sets sail to break the siege of Gaza, big questions loom about the nature of today's Judaism and of state power in Israel and America. Increasingly, I have doubts and fears about the latter, but, having served in our government for nearly three decades, I know that, in the private corridors of power, appeals to what is good and just often win the day. I hope that there are still those in Washington and Jerusalem willing to make such appeals.

Concerning the nature of Judaism, one always has to ask whether it represents a set of exclusivist tribal ethics or the universal moral code of prophets who speak to all humankind, prophets who, in the words of Micah, call us all "to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

Thanks to courageous Israeli Jews I know personally – folks like Michal, Eitan, Jeff, and Avraham – and a young American Jew sailing with Alice on the Audacity of Hope, Gabriel Matthew Schivone (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-moment-before-boarding-the-next-flotilla-1.369336), I find assurance that the soul of the prophets still beats strongly in Judaism and can be moved by a universal appeal to justice.

In the meantime, I must express my outrage that our United State Department of State, for which I once worked, would "warn" those who would make such an appeal to cease and desist, in effect washing its hands of the blood of unarmed American citizens who might once again be killed or wounded on the high seas by Israeli "commandos" (http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/white-house-gaza-flotilla-activists-may-be-breaking-u-s-law-1.369486).

In doing so, I would recall also what Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, said in expressing her "deep concern" over the deaths arising from the IDF attack this time last year on the earlier Gaza Flotilla. Those "deaths of civilians working to deliver humanitarian aid," she wrote in her letter to President Obama, "could not have happened absent the counterproductive Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Episcopal Church strongly supports American leadership toward ending the blockade. There are far better ways to protect Israel's security and promote moderate political leadership in Gaza than a blockade that intensifies human suffering and perpetuates regional insecurity."

This year, as another tragedy looms, I would hope that my church and other churches would speak out before the fact to commend those who would witness with their bodies on behalf of justice and non-violence and warn Jerusalem and Washington of the self-isolating moral consequences of further bloodshed.

Finally, I applaud our own Barbara Lee (D- Berkeley/Oakland) and Sam Farr (D-Salinas) and the four other members of Congress who have just written Secretary Clinton urging her to "work with the Israeli government to ensure the safety of the U.S. citizens on board" the U.S. boat to Gaza, and urge you to contact the other members of our Bay Area delegation to Congress, including Minority Leader Pelosi and our own Representative George Miller (D-Martinez), to urge them to take a similar stand in this moment of moral and political accounting.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A version of this appeared in the Vallejo Times-Herald, June 30, 2011

YES, NINA, THERE IS A PALESTINE

2011-05-18T19:48:00.001-07:00

In March I returned from a trip to Palestine, my third. A friend asked "Where did you go?" "Palestine," I said. "But, there is no Palestine," she replied. "Yes, there is. I was there. Didn't you get my postcard from Bethlehem?" "Oh, I've also visited Bethlehem. It's in Israel." "No," I said, exasperated, "it's separated from Israel by a 30-foot Wall and the IDF." So it went, as we talked past each other.

I don't think I convinced her - not even with the pictures of the Wall, the checkpoint, the soldiers. To Nina, to most Americans, and, I fear, to the President, there is no Palestine and there are, therefore, no Palestinians deserving of the same freedom and dignity enjoyed by Israelis…and by us.

But, I know better. I have met the Palestinians, broken bread with them, prayed with them, stood with them as they faced the soldiers, listened to their stories. And everywhere – from Hebron to Jenin – I listened to their outrage at our February veto of a UN Security Council resolution that, echoing international law and our own U.S. government position, would have declared illegal the Israeli settlements that command nearly every Palestinian hilltop and called for the resettlement – to Israel - of the half million Israeli Jews who live in them. I also experienced how the possibilities of the Arab Awakening swirling around them had seeped into the psyches of young Palestinians and filled them with hope and a palpably fearless defiance – not just of Israel, but of Fatah, Hamas, and, yes, us…of all the powers that be that had for so long deprived them of their human dignity. From them I heard one word over and over – Hurriya! Freedom!

This combination of hope – of achievable possibility – and fearlessness is powerful. It has created what IDF spokesman Brigadier-General Yoav Mordecha has called "a very different reality" in and around Palestine. There is a whiff of Morocco's "Green March" and our own Freedom Riders in the march of unarmed Palestinian refugees toward the barbed wire and guns…and home…beyond the border between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights at Majdal Shams. And there is an echo of Gandhi in the non-violent "White Intifada" that seems to be taking hold in the towns and villages of the West Bank and even Gaza.

Speaking of the border breaches at Majdal Shams, one Israeli military analyst said "A barrier of fear has been crossed." He meant that the unarmed Palestinians who stormed the border - and those who demonstrated around the West Bank and in Jerusalem - no longer fear the IDF or the consequences of their actions. The Arab Spring has reached Palestine...and Israel, and, among Palestinians, courage has replaced fear.

In Israel, however, fear has been replaced by panic. Discipline and dignity, it seems, is crumbling in the face of a qualitatively new situation and increasingly giving way to the sort of mob action displayed by the IDF in any number of now viral videos. The scenes of the killings at Majdal Shams (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgkuAaTjPg) and the beatings of unarmed youngsters – many of them Israelis – at Nabi Saleh (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPlLc9uge-0) conjure up memories of Kent State and a police riot in Chicago. And, once again, the whole world is watching.

One has the sense of an unraveling in progress - of a formerly confident, increasingly less democratic Israeli state and of the impotent, hypocritical stance of the U.S. vis-a-vis the conflict. Both countries are increasingly isolated and in retreat as September approaches, when, Israeli and American protestations aside, the United Nations will recognize a new independent state of Palestine. Then what? A denouement is approaching. Knowing better than us what will happen in the next weeks and months - and, more importantly, what may not happen - George Mitchell has thrown in the towel on a failed policy based on a fantasy that there is no Palestine worth talking about and that its non-people can continue to be ignored.

The cognitive dissonance between that fantasy and the reality I have seen with my own eyes threatens insanity. And policies based on insanity threaten disaster…for us, for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis. For the sake of us all, Mr. President, please wake up. Please shake free of the fantasy. Please do what reality demands. Our peace depends on it.

A STREET CHURCH STORY

2011-05-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

On Easter Sunday, the San Francisco Night Ministry celebrated the third anniversary of its Tenderloin Open Cathedral, an ecumenical open air Eucharist, where every Sunday for three years - rain or shine - spiritual bread has been broken with a regular congregation of fifty or so and physical food shared with over a hundred. It is a place where people have been baptized, wed, and changed.

Last week, we inaugurated a new service, an Open Cathedral in the city's predominantly Hispanic Mission District. And, now, we can say "OC Mission is up and running!"

It was 5:30 last Thursday, May 12… bright and sunny. Ron, our usher emeritus, was waiting as Monique, our UCC minister, and I arrived at the BART at 16^th and Mission. So was an eclectic crowd – black, white, and brown; old and, mostly, young; speaking English and, mostly, Spanish; some busily hurrying on, some lolling about on the metal benches and circular stone stoop around the station entrance. We knew all would be well, for Moses was there to welcome us, too. After we told him what we were about, he promised to return and, indeed, dropped in – and, out – at various times during the service.

To be sure, most kept their distance, only a few, it seemed, listening at all…except, that is, for Mark, a young – and big – African American who listened intently and with growing curiosity, as I read the Psalm and, then, Gospel in my deep voice which startles some. As Monique began to preach – to no one, it seemed - he began to wave the service sheet and shout about sin and hell. I went to quiet him down and received instead a sermon about Leviticus…about how I "should not lie down with other men," about how "you know what you are" and, "if you don't change, you'll burn in hell."

Putting down the microphone for the moment, Monique joined us. Mark explained how his life had been a mess and turned around at some local evangelical church where – not his words – he learned to fear God, to be judged, and to judge. Monique, in turn, explained our non-judgmental theology of a God of love. As she did, he calmed down. They promised to continue the conversation after the service and he quietly walked off to the side.

Then, a funny thing happened. Maybe it was the unexpected noise, the overheard conversation…but, as Monique continued the bilingual sermon, as Ron passed out the bilingual service sheets, people started to come – black, white; Anglo, Hispanic; a few with kids in tow. The interest turned to reverence, as Monique broke the bread. And, as we began the Lord's Prayer, our circle numbered more than a dozen, strangers holding hands, praying together in Spanish and English.

There were still more – newcomers, old friends Monique knew from the street – as we shared the bread and wine. Monique gave an extra- large piece of bread to the disheveled barefoot woman who kept repeating loudly "I'm hungry!" - responding, I couldn't help but feel, to yet another persistent widow. And, passing the cup, I've learned to say – and mean - "Sangre Cristo."

It came time for the dismissal. I hadn't given thought about what to say in Spanish. All that came out was a loud, simple, and heartfelt "Vaya con Dios!"

We all did…but not before sharing what little physical food and drink we had – a case of sodas and that blessed box of Bob's donuts. It wasn't much. It wasn't enough. But, oh, how the little boy beamed, when I produced that chocolate covered donut…how grateful the lady who returned for seconds and thirds.

Little knots of people gathered for continued conversations – old friends of Monique's who promised to return; a newcomer, a troubled young lady raised Roman Catholic who, upon learning that Monique and I had shared her background, asked about Baptism. Names and phone numbers were written down, promises made to see each other next week.

The sun was still out. We had done our "thing." It was time to" go with God." We did, waving to each other and to our new friends – as we went our separate ways. Crossing Mission, then 16^th, I found a new spring to my step. About a block away, outside the now-closed Chinese market, I passed a lady who had shared our bread and donuts. She said "Thank you." "See you next week," I replied.

It's a start.

BIN LADEN AND US

2011-05-18T16:33:00.001-07:00

The days since Osama bin Laden's death Sunday before last have been disturbing. They have brought to mind all that we lost. The chants of "USA!

USA

!" were an especially jarring reminder of our blood lust for mindless revenge that, ten years ago, destroyed that too-brief sense of shared mourning and community after September 11 and silenced in our throats that unasked question that still haunts the nation: "Why do they hate us?" The answer, I fear, was plain to see on our TV screens.

There again were the parade of colonels thrilling us with the nuts and bolts of how skillfully we "took out" "Geronimo;" the chorus of discredited officials using one more killing to justify moral abominations such as "enhanced interrogation," Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and unjust, aggressive war; the crowds of twenty-somethings, too young to remember a pre-9/11 world, too self-absorbed to think of the handful of young Americans still hunkered down in Afghanistan

I find myself sitting in sadness for all that occurred these past ten years, the lives lost, the opportunities squandered, and our continued triumphalism that enables us to go wherever we want to do whatever we want, to celebrate our power, and never to have to ask that fateful question: "Why do they hate us." In his moment of triumph, the President said that "if we set our minds to it, Americans can do whatever we want." Yes we can, Mr. President…but should we?

All of which begs the question – What should we be doing in this "post-Osama world?" Instead of dancing on the grave of one dead man, we should be concentrating on improving the lives of the many millions of Arabs who for centuries have suffered humiliation at the hands of a triumphalist and exploitive West. We should recognize that it has been that humiliation that Osama bin Laden and other purveyors of violence have appealed to. And, in this vein, we should recognize that, as Chris Matthews said last week, "You can't kill all the would-be terrorists. You have to kill the reasons they want to be terrorists."

Our security rests not on our military prowess, not on our demonstrated ability to kill, nor on our doubling down on the "war on terror." It rests rather on our ability to demonstrate our support – our tangible support – for democracy and the desire for dignity in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and, yes, Palestine. Peace in and with the Arab world requires doubling down on our support for the Arab Awakening sweeping that world. And it requires doubling down on our efforts to extend that peace – a peace with dignity and justice – to the people of Israel and Palestine. We must deny the terrorists the fuel for their fires of hatred.

We must also tend to our peace at home. If we are to live with a forward-looking confidence, we must put aside the fears we have allowed the terrorists to plant in our souls…fears that have given rise to unwise and unworthy policies, have led us to forfeit our very liberties, and poisoned our discourse. As John said in his Gospel, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love."

Above all, we should seize this day as an opportunity for long overdue reflection on where we have been this past decade, on where we are going, and on what we will and will not do as Americans and as people of faith. At long last, can we not ask the unasked questions: Why do they hate us? Why do we hate "them?" Why are we so fearful?

Might I suggest that we reflect also on our response thus far to the death of this one man – Osama bin Laden. How should we respond? I think, in this regard, the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, got it right:

" Osama bin Laden, as we all know, bore the most serious responsibility for spreading divisions and hatred among populations, causing the deaths of innumerable people, and manipulating religions to this end. In the face of a man's death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred."

In a more general sense, Martin Luther King, Jr. also got it right:

" Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that; hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Finally, might we turn this day to the reflective task to which Father Lombardi and Dr. King point us? Might we consider what our calling to peace and reconciliation requires of us? A good place to start might be the prayer for our enemies in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer:

" O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead us and them from prejudice to truth; deliver us and them from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in Your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before You; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN"

____________________________________________________________

This first appeared in the Vallejo Times-Herald May 13, 2011

CONFRONTING THE OCCUPATION

2011-05-18T16:22:00.001-07:00

On March 8, I returned from a two-week pilgrimage to Israel and occupied Palestine (i.e., the West Bank and East Jerusalem), my third trip to the area. It was emotionally devastating.

I travelled in the company of some thirty Northern California members of Sabeel, an ecumenical Palestinian Christian liberation theology group based in Jerusalem (www.fosna.org) that is headed by The Rev. Naim Ateek, an Episcopal priest and graduate of CDSP.

Our trip was a little different from the average Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The average pilgrim flies into Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, gets on an Israeli bus, drives up the coast to the Galilee, across the Galilee to Nazareth and Capernum, down the ethnically-cleansed Jordan Valley, and up through the Judean Wilderness to Jerusalem. Such pilgrims see lots of sacred sites, but meet not a single Palestinian, and return with the same one-sided view of Israel/Palestine he or she left with.

Ours, however, was a pilgrimage to experience the truth of the current situation in Israel/Palestine and to witness to it.

To that end, we travelled from Mount Hermon on the occupied Golan Heights, where we met with Druze villagers cut off from their families in Syria, to the Negev desert in Israel's south where Bedouin villagers are struggling to save their homes from demolition.

And across the West Bank we experienced pain at every turn – the shuttered shops in Hebron, the empty ones in Bethlehem, the farmers in Qalqilya and Jayous cut off from their fields, the sullen streets of the refugee camps, the still-open wound of a decade-old massacre in Jenin, the stench of tear gas in Bilin. And, everywhere, the gleaming white hilltop colonies, home to half a million "settlers;" the myriad checkpoints; and the looming obscenity of a 30-foot high wall.

The pain was perhaps most pronounced in East Jerusalem's neighborhoods where we met with Palestinians whose homes were being demolished in Silwan and, in Sheikh Jarrah, where elderly Palestinians were living in a tent beside their home now occupied by young Israeli religious extremists. Even the dead, we learned, were being dispossessed. In the Muslim cemetery of Mamilla - across the street from the American Consulate – graves were being desecrated to make room for an American-financed "Museum of Tolerance."

My sense of profound sadness and moral outrage was blessedly tempered by our encounters with young Palestinians and Israelis. Among the former – from our young host in Arbour refugee camp to the exuberant actors in Jenin's Freedom Theater to dear Lubna, a future leader of a truly free Palestine – the hope they drew from the Arab Awakening now sweeping the Middle East was downright contagious. So, too, was the hope I found in young Israelis unwilling to trade their souls for land or patriotic myth – the high school senior facing imprisonment for resisting the draft; the Jewish kids from Solidarity Sheikh Jarrah putting on a puppet show for dispossessed Palestinian toddlers; and Michal, who, asked on a bus in the Negev about the appropriateness of the term "apartheid," replied "It's time to call it what is."

Yes, it's time.

This first appeared on Episcopal News Service March 30, 2011

EGYPT: THE VIEW FROM VALLEJO...AND JENIN

2011-02-11T10:12:00.001-08:00

Last night – this morning – I sat till near 1:00 a.m. before this screen, watching Al Jazeera's coverage of the gathering crowd in Tahrir Square, waiting for…God knew what. I went to bed, still watching CNN…and , on PBS,Charlie Rose, Tom Friedman, for once making sense, offering hope…and those reporters from the New York Times and the Economist. I dozed off, waking just before three to the sound of noonday prayers - a strange defiant voice – and the incredible sight of a sea of people, seemingly a single organism, undulating, chanting in unison.

I awoke a minute or two before eight, flipped on the bedroom TV, just in time to watch Suleiman read that terse announcement that Mubarak had resigned, to watch that sea of humanity in evening twilight erupt in jubilation. And, from a balcony in the Nile Hilton I savored the view that Mimi and I knew 38 years ago, the Corniche below, the Nile in the background. This time their were no convoys with sandbags headed north, the night before a war, just a single tank and crowds of people rushing south to the square called "liberation." Their repeated shout – "Misr hurra!" – "Egypt's Free!"

And in these eighteen days not an American nor an Israeli flag has been burned nor any violence visited by the people on their tormentors.

My prayer for Egypt had been answered. I'm dead tired, but full of energy for these coming weeks....and a visit to Jenin.

Pray now for Palestine.

And now the view from Jenin: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/palestinians-can-only-watch-as-egyptians-are-living-their-dream-1.342762

Guns and Moral Choice

2011-01-15T16:43:00.001-08:00

Once I was a Foreign Service Officer, a political officer trained to look at a host society and try to understand what makes it tick. Over the years and many absences, I've become accustomed to looking at my own country in much the same way...as an objective outside observor, seeking to make sense of an often jumbled mosaic. One thing I've always stumbled over - that makes no sense to me - is

America

's obsession with guns and our inability reasonably to regulate their possession and use in the face of an arguably evil lobby.

How can one make sense of such inaction in a country where there are 90 guns for every 100 people – our nearest competitor being Yemen with 61 per 100 – or where gun deaths each year are twenty times those in any other industrialized democracy? How can one reason with those who might deny the least among us the right to adequate health care, while insisting that the unfettered right to a gun comes from God? What does one say to Erich Pratt of the Gun Owners of America when he insists that our rights to a gun are "God-given rights" that "can't be infringed or limited in any way?"

It's as if we're trapped in a dark nightmare, powerless to escape.

Reporters and pundits tell us that there's "little chance the attack [will] produce new legislation." "Forget about it," they tell us, "there's nothing you can do." But there is! Listen to the Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman:

"Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience - the instinct of self-preservation will do, encouraged by the comforting thought that it is not my turn yet, thank God: by lying low I can still escape."

But, Bauman adds:

"...putting self-preservation above moral duty is in no way predetermined, inevitable, inescapable. One can be pressed to do [evil], but cannot be forced to do it, and thus one cannot really shift the responsibility for doing it onto those who exerted the pressure. It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the logic of self-preservation. it shows it for what it is in the end - a choice. One wonders how many people must defy that logic for evil to be incapacitated. Is there a magic threshold of defiance beyond which the technology of evil grinds to a halt?"

Isn't it time that we test that thesis, seek that magic threshold with regard to the gun lobby. It is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. And, I would argue it is our moral duty - our choice - to resist. All it takes is one person to stand up and say "Enough!" And another. And yet another. All it takes is for one congressman or one senator to stop lying low, followed by another, and yet another. All it takes is for our congressmen and senators to see their "self-preservation" not in terms of just another electoral victory, but rather of the existential struggle Gabrielle Giffords is now facing.

Aren't Americans intelligent? Free? Good? Aren't we masters of our own fate? Can't we shake ourselves from the nightmare? Awakened, can't we stand upright…and stand up to a lobby that cynics have described variously as "amoral," "effective," and "all-powerful?" Can't we call the NRA for what it really is – evil! And can't we muster the moral courage to resist? The choice is ours.

“BUT” IS A BIG WORD

2010-08-23T21:05:00.001-07:00

Not long ago I visited Manzanar – you know, the internment camp in the Owens Valley where Japanese Americans - loyal Americans, fellow Californians - were incarcerated for "the duration." It was the annual reunion of surviving internees, whose only "crime" had been that their skin was yellow and that others who looked like them had attacked our shared country at Pearl Harbor.

Wandering the dusty camp, I was surprised that so many of my fellow visitors were young Muslims, many in hijabs. I asked a Japanese American friend what that was about. She told me how, on September 11, 2001, Japanese Americans, especially in Los Angeles, had flocked to local mosques to stand in solidarity with their Muslim neighbors in their hour of vulnerability.

And from that spontaneous gesture there sprouted several groups of high school-age Japanese and Muslim American youngsters who meet regularly to share their cultures and experiences, to learn from each other, and to seek ways to promote tolerance.

In this, our summer of discontent, Muslim Americans – and tolerance - are again at risk, as the fires of racial and religious enmity are enflamed by those on the right who would invoke hatred and division for short-term electoral gain. It is an unworthy and dangerous game, this morphing of anti-immigrant xenophobia, of racist appeals to white fears, and, now, of anti-Muslim hysteria.

The story-line of this anti-Muslim hysteria was artificially concocted out of whole cloth by one of the most extreme voices in the blogosphere – Pam Geller of Rupert Murdoch's Newsmax and New York Post who launched her "Monster Mosque" campaign in May and is now organizing rallies against what she's labeled the "Ground Zero Mosque." Her attempt to link all Muslims with the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 - killing nearly three thousand Americans, including dozens of Muslim Americans - and her cruel and cynical manipulation of the emotions of those whose loved ones died that day were quickly injected into the national bloodstream by politicians like Newt Gingrich and the all-too-quick-to-tweet Sarah Palin. And, since July, these divisive calumnies have been beaten like a tin drum by Murdoch's Fox News.

It's no wonder Speaker Pelosi raised questions about the money woven through this "journalistic" thread. Might the FCC consider whether some are using the public airwaves to propagandize rather than inform? Are they not our airwaves? Are there not still licensing requirements? And what about the media itself? Who's asking the tough questions, digging out the truth? To be sure, CNN has done a decent job of late, separating the orchestrated fantasies of a "Monster Mosque" from the facts of the Cordoba Center, putting Geller on the air, and asking her the tough questions.

But these issues of journalistic ethics and political decency pale before the greater task facing us as the hateful hysteria spreads across the land…as mosques are opposed in places like Tennessee, as Florida churches organize Qur'an burnings, as people around the country call for banning hijabs and minarets…all in a time when those who would gut the First and Fourteenth amendments call for "Second Amendment solutions" to our problems.

It is a very dangerous time. It is a time for all Americans – Christians, Jews, those of other religions, and of none – to stand beside the most vulnerable among us, as Angeleno Japanese Americans did on September 11, and as Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and Manhattan JCC Executive Director Joy Levitt are doing today.

It is time to recall those words of a German pastor, Martin Niemoeller – to paraphrase, first they came for the socialists, then the Jews….I didn't speak…and when they came for me. there was no one left to speak.

In the spirit of those words, I call especially on my fellow Christians to speak. The silence is deafening. For God's sake, speak…for those who pray to God in perhaps a different voice, but who pray to the same one God.

And, please, no more next-morning backtracking, no more "buts," no more "I support your right to worship, but not your right to exercise it…not there, not now." No more ifs, and, or buts. "But" is a big word, but it's not in the First Amendment!

THE INTENTIONAL TRAVELER: GETTING LOST IN OAXACA AND CHIAPAS

2010-07-24T21:09:00.001-07:00

At first blush, "getting lost…intentionally" may seem the quintessential oxymoron. By my lights and Paul Theroux's, however, it's the only way to travel. It is the difference between being a tourist and being a pilgrim.

The pilgrim, the true pilgrim – for many "pilgrims" are but spiritual tourists – cuts her ties to all that is familiar and loses herself among strangers, opening herself at every turn to God's serendipity.

That is how I traveled last fall to Oaxaca and Chiapas, the southernmost heart of indigenous Mexico. Unsure of what I would find, I wanted to test the validity of what I had read against the reality the everyday lives of the indigenous people there – the Mayans of Chiapas and the Zapotecs of Oaxaca.

SOME THOUGHTS WHILE IN THE AIR

Every story requires some context. The story of the Maya in Chiapas and the Zapotecs in Oaxaca is one of survival – of economic survival in the face of modernization and globalization and of cultural survival in the wake of five hundred years of colonization. It is what the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas have called the "war against oblivion."

It is not a short story, nor a recent war. From the start – the arrival of the conquistadors in 1519 – the history of the indigenous people of southern Mexico has been one of economic exploitation and racial discrimination - a continuing tale largely unchanged by the Revolution of 1810, essentially an enterprise of the Spanish-descended elite and the majority mestizos.

It is a story that, by and large, has revolved around land reform – the ability to remain on and eke out a living from ancestral lands – and the dignidad of self-rule in self-defined ways on those lands.

To be sure it is not an uncomplicated, black-and-white story. Many of the intrusions made by the Mexican central government upon the autonomy of its indigenous peoples have, for example, been well-intentioned efforts to expand the availability of modern health care and education and to redress social inequities in areas such as women's rights.

However well-intentioned, the effects of these modernizing efforts have been socially destabilizing and, to the extent that they have disrupted traditional forms of communal land ownership and sought to impose global economic patterns that favor international corporate interests, they have wrought economic havoc on the unprepared, disoriented Maya and Zapotec peoples. Understandably, this has generated resistance.

OCCUPIED OAXACA

Descending from the dark mountains of central Mexico into a bright southern sunlight, the oblong valley of Oaxaca looked every bit as lovely as Shangri-La. Up close, however, political shadows quickly impinged. One could not escape the heavy presence of the black-uniformed, heavily armed Federal Police – the Federalistas – and the occasional but ostentatious army convoys which gave downtown Oaxaca very much the feel of an occupied city.

The memory of the 2006 "days of rage, when Oaxaquenos rose up against their hated Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, remains palpable. That revolt, precipitated by a massive teachers' strike, brought together the various strands of years of discontent – the teachers, the indigenous communities, the working poor of the city – and drew strength from the Zapatistas in neighboring Chiapas and from the national electoral campaign of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. For five months – from June to November 2006 – the city and much of the state was a "government-free zone," with daily life organized by a very spontaneous Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca or APPO. The experiment was crushed on November 25 in a bloody crackdown that left 17 dead and 140 wounded.

During my week in Oaxaca, however, I learned that the APPO is very much alive, providing a defiant alternative framework for social life. But, on my first night, such lessons were yet to be learned as we met up with our local leader, Juan de Dios Gomez, a kind and gentle anthropologist

After a breakfast next morning of salsa-soaked beans, eggs, and tortillas, we were briefed on the demography and culture of the area. About 30% of Oaxaca's 3.5 million people are, we were told, indigenous – mostly Zapotecs, some Mixtecs - and 85% nominally Roman Catholic. Nearly 20% are illiterate and per capita income hovers around $4,000, less than half the national average, in an economy heavily dependent on agriculture (agave, coffee, and, of course, corn or maize), handicrafts (weaving and wood carving), and a tourist industry severely damaged by the tensions and violence of recent years.

Soon enough we were introduced to some of the victims of those tensions – leaders of the Zapotec community of San Augustin Loxicha in the Sierra Sur. Juan Sosa, only recently released from a high security prison, spoke eloquently about being hunted by the federal police that occupied his and other communities to enforce central government control and about the para-military squads that still surround them. Jorge Hernandez, who had just been released a few days earlier after eleven years imprisonment, much of it in solitary confinement, appeared to be suffering PTSD, staring into space in silence, as his wife Laura spoke of raising two children on her own.

In the next few days, south of the city and in the Sierra Sur, we learned about the efforts in indigenous communities such as Ocotlon, Zaachila, Sola de Vega, and Chapulin to maintain traditional self-rule and to develop economic self-help projects that might keep young people from emigrating. Particularly moving were Adnan Lopez Santiago, a teachers' union activist and director of Radio Zaachila, a source of alternative news; and Noemi Gomez Bravo, a member of a United Nations working group on the rights of indigenous women, who, while she spoke with us about those rights, lovingly nursed her infant daughter.

In the north, we heard similar stories. At the University of the Sierra Juarez Professor Aldo Gonzalez told us about the disastrous inroads of North American corporations on the local economy – about the destructive impact on local maize production of Monsanto's trans-genetic corn, Coca Cola's plans to privatize local water resources, and Syngenta's efforts to patent centuries-old strains of Mayan maize.

In Capulalpam, we stayed at an idyllic eco-tourism facility built by hand by community members. As we surveyed the lush Natividad valley below, we learned that a Canadian company had just bought the "underground" rights to the community's land and planned to re-open a long-closed gold mine - an operation that would pollute the valley and the river that ran through it.

Back in Ciudad Oaxaca, our thoughts returned briefly to the on-going festivities surrounding the Dias de los Muertos. I must admit, however, that I found myself turned off by the rush of tourists – Mexican and North American – in the cemeteries we visited All Saints evening. I felt like an intruder on so many private griefs.

And in the zocalo, I found myself unexpectedly caught up in the tug of current tensions. In the midst of another teachers' demonstration "under the arches" where dozens were killed three years earlier, I felt the still palpable rage…and, for a brief moment, fear.

But, before I left, I felt also the dignity of those who face that fear with courage. On our last night in Oaxaca, we gathered in a gallery in an outlying neighborhood with artists and musicians to celebrate the continued vitality of the APPO. We smiled and danced and sang…with some abandon. And on my wall at home now hangs a black-and-white print of dozens of Day of the Dead skeletons defiantly carrying a banner which reads: Nuestros muertos seran vengados como APPO – Our dead will be avenged by the APPO. Leaving Oaxaca, I had the sense rather that they will be vindicated…by life.

THE DEACONS' REVOLT

The trip to San Cristobal de las Casas started with a pleasant one hour flight to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the mestizo-dominated, lowland capital of Chiapas. After an only slightly longer taxi ride into the clouds on a newly constructed super highway, San Cristobal revealed itself through a cut in the mountains – a smaller, urban Shangri-La perched at nearly 7,000 feet.

My base there – for close to two weeks - was the Na Bolom (House of the Jaguar). Originally built as a seminary, it was the long-time home of Trudi Duby Blom, a Swiss-born photographer-anthropologist and her Danish-born husband, Franz Blom, an archaeologist. The purpose of Na Bolom and the foundation the Bloms established is to make Chiapas and especially the isolated Lancandons they befriended respectfully accessible.

San Cristobal is relatively prosperous, incredibly clean, and now very much tethered to Tuxtla Gutierrez and the central government. Unlike Oaxaca, however, there was not a Federalista or soldier in sight. And, mixing comfortably with the pizzerias and up-scale galleries, weavers from surrounding villages peddled their wares around the Santo Domingo church, as did adherents from Zapatista communities to the south and west.

Around the huge cross on the cathedral plaza young men of the Emiliano Zapata Campesino Organization (OCEZ) routed from their southern communities by federalistas and paramilitaries had set up a tent encampment to protest their expulsions, the murder of two of their brothers, and the imprisonment of others whose treatment had earned the attention of Amnesty International. Behind a rope barrier, they cooked soup over wood fires and accepted bread handed over the ropes. I still treasure the "Gracias, amiga" I got when I handed over several bags of bread from a local bakery. Typical of the "Mexican standoff" that persists throughout the state, there was no attempt by the authorities to interfere with such assistance or to dislodge the protestors.

In the northern villages, too, there was a notable absence of police or military. San Juan Chamula, a strange and fiercely independent Tzotzil community of 70,000, remains very much in the hands of the local caciques or bosses who have worked their way up the "cargo" system pecking order.

Still higher in the mountains, I found Zinacantan – the "Place of the Bats" – obscured in the clouds and a chill drizzle. Most of its 20,000 inhabitants earn a living weaving and selling hot house crops and have a reputation for being entrepreneurs. At one weaver's home I got a taste of that entrepreneurship and the more-relaxed Zinacanteco hospitality, enjoying tortillas right off the fire while shopping the distinctive purple and black huipiles.

Traveling east and south of San Cristobal, however, one quickly runs into a pronounced military presence astride the main roads. There are, for example, huge Mexican Army bases where the road from the city forks toward Comitan to the south and Ocasingo and Palenque to the east and at Tonina, just south of Ocasingo, on the edge of the Zapatista-controlled canyons.

Ocasingo, the site of a particularly bloody massacre on January 2, 1994, remains a surly crossroads of traffic and rebellion and pretty much under a government-lockdown. Just east of the town, our mini-van was stopped at an army checkpoint. After showing identification and opening bags, we were waved on our way past a sign in perfect English wishing us a "Good Trip." A few miles further east, another sign - this time in Spanish - announced that we were entering Zapatista territory. It was a kabuki dance repeated again as we left the main road to drive the mile to Agua Azul, a beautiful national park of cascading waterfalls. There, we were halted at a roadblock manned by federalistas, before arriving, a few hundred yards further on, at the park entrance where we paid the obligatory fee at a shack bearing the red star and logo of the Zapatistas. Go figure! But, I thought, at least they're not shooting at each other.

Ocasingo, the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, and the ceasefire that has obtained since then all bear the stamp of Samuel Ruiz, the Roman Catholic Bishop of San Cristobal from 1960 to 1999. The story of that involvement – very much a spiritual journey by "Don Sam" – strikes me as an appropriate place to end this story of my journey.

Samuel Ruiz Garcia, a middle class son of central Mexico, was a very conventional cleric when he was appointed bishop in 1960. Soon after arriving in San Cristobal, he began his journey – literally – travelling by mule to the Mayan villages of the diocese. Those trips were life-changing. In the beginning, he said, he was "like a fish that sleeps with its eyes open," not seeing the "cruel oppression" all around him. Soon, however, he found himself actively siding with the poor good people he met, learning their languages, dispatching catechists into the canyons, and vowing to integrate the indigenous into the life of the church.

It was a vow reinforced by his experience at Vatican II and his being drafted in 1974 to organize a first national indigenous congress on the five hundredth birthday of Fray Bartolome de las Casas, Chiapas' first bishop and outspoken defender of the Mayan peoples. It was envisaged by the governor who appointed him as a feel-good folkloric event. Ruiz, however, invited the villages to appoint their own representatives to the Congress to voice their real concerns in what became a very political affair. Its motto said it all: Nunca mas un Mexico sin nosotros – Never again a

Mexico

without us! Against the predations of mestizo ranchers and timber companies and their own caciques, the indigenous poor at the congress adopted a platform that stressed the need for "land to belong to the man who worked it" and a plea for honest counselors to teach the poor their rights and how to speak.

Within a year, Bishop Sam declared the diocese's "option for the poor," and began to raise up indigenous deacons who might be those "honest counselors." In 1976, 34 deacons - in Tseltal, tuhuneletik, "servants of the community" - were nominated by their communities and ordained by the bishop. Three years later the canyon communities south of Ocasingo elected a "deacon of deacons" – a 24-year-old – to preside over an increasingly organized opposition to their exploitation. The seeds of resistance had been planted.

This is not the place to revisit the subsequent history of how the Marxist Zapatistas grafted themselves onto this existing organization or of the precipitate events that led to the violent uprising of New Year's Day 1994. I hope you will make that the stuff of further reading. Suffice it to say that those events included the Mexican government's mid-1980s reneging on land reform and its acquiescence in the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, which treaty has since destroyed the maize economy of Chiapas. Indeed, it was the entry into force of that treaty on January 1, 1994 that provided the occasion for the onset of armed hostilities under the Zapatistas' cry of Basta – Enough!

Suffice it to say also, that Bishop Sam sought to head off the violence that claimed 120 lives in those first twelve days of 1994, spoke forcefully against it when it occurred, and worked tirelessly in the months afterward to hammer out the ceasefire that still holds. At least, as I've said, they're not shooting each other. The indigenous poor, moreover, have learned their rights and have learned how to stand and speak with dignity. And, as Bishop Sam said in pastoral letter of August 6, 1993, "A Silent Cry of Sorrowful Warning:" "This particular local church, deeply stamped with the Gospel faithfulness of Fray Bartolome de las Casas, has opted in these last decades to take its place at the margins of society and with the poorest."

May we too.

*******************

FURTHER READING

Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996)

Nancy Davies (ed.), The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Assembly (New York: Narco News Books, 2007)

Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective (eds.), Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2008)

Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor (eds.), Gertude Blom: Bearing Witness (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1984)

Selma Holo, Oaxaca at the Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004)

Gary MacEoin, The People's Church: Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Mexico and Why He Matters (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996)

Rick Steves, Travel as a Political Act (New York: Nation Books, 2009)

Michael Tangeman,

Mexico

at the Crossroads: Politics, the Church, and the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995)

Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend (New York; Mariner Books, 2001)

Ziga Vodovnik (ed.), Ya Basta: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising (Oakland: AK Press, 2004)

Henry Raup Wagner, The Life and Writings of Bartolome de las Casas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967)

John Womack, Jr. (ed.), Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader (New York: The New Press, 1999)

A SMEAR TOO FAR

2010-07-21T21:59:00.001-07:00

It's truly amazing how quickly the sliming of Shirley Sherrod morphed into a story not about the wrong inflicted upon a good and decent person and those who perpetrated and perpetuated the lie behind it, but rather about whether the "Tea Party" – whatever that is – has supposedly been wronged by the NAACP. Witness the Times-Herald's op-ed page of July 21 – two columns, an editorial, a scurrilous cartoon…and nary a mention of Ms. Sherrod, Andrew Breitbart who peddled the doctored video of her March 27 remarks in Georgia, or Fox News which spread the calumny on our public airwaves.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous has apologized for being "snookered" by the Fox noise machine, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack has apologized for his knee-jerk firing of Ms. Sherrod, and White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs has apologized for the White House's undefined role (Might I suggest cowardice?) in all this.

Meanwhile, the firebugs at Fox contentedly, silently, watch the conflagration they've sparked spread across the land. They offer no apologies and, indeed, they smilingly, shamelessly continue to sprinkle fuel on the fire, as their right wing regulars – Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck – egg on the burgeoning brawl between the NAACP and the "Tea Party" and a steady-stream of new black faces is trotted out to trash icons of the civil rights movement like John Lewis and hijack the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

And Americans – black, white…brown, red, and yellow – who love this imperfect country and seek its perfection find themselves sick at heart close to tears, as others – those who over and over again use the tools of division to gain and maintain power – very consciously, very deliberately sow racial strife.

This time, however, they've gone too far! This cannot stand!

It's time for those care to stand up, to fight back, and - in the words of the Philadelphia Inquirer (T-H, July 21) – to stop denying racism and start confronting it. It's time to speak the truth.

What is the truth? In the matter at hand – this whole sordid Shirley Sherrod affair – the truth is that it is not an isolated, stand-alone story, but rather part and parcel of a concerted, rather transparent effort by the right wing noise machine to inject the extraneous issue of race, into this year's congressional elections.

How else to interpret Fox's obsessive year-long drumbeat about perceived black racism? How else to explain Sean Hannity's repetitive replaying of very old videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright giving voice to sometimes uncomfortable truths? Of Glenn Beck's persecution of that "communist" Van Jones? Of their stories that resulted in the shutting down of ACORN…stories based on undercover videos shot by since-indicted faux "reporter" Dennis O'Keefe? Of their dredging up of a minor two-year old story on the inconsequential New Black Panther Party…a story based on the "he said, she said" charges of a Republican operative who once worked for the Justice Department. Of their denigration of the long and deeply respected NAACP? There's a pattern here and it's a dangerous game, this picking at our national scab.

What is the truth? The raw material, the muck of this campaign is regularly concocted and served up by extremist bloggers like Breitbart. It is mud that would sink of its own weight into their paranoid swamp were it not picked up and injected into the national discourse by Fox. Theirs is a symbiotic, self-serving relationship, now laid bare by their over-reaching. Here they have engaged in a smear too far.

What is the truth? For years, the foot soldiers and front groups of this operation have been financed in the shadows by a coterie of billionaires intent on preserving their personal fortunes at any cost. To hell with ethics! To hell with the national interest! Theirs are not household names, but their fingerprints are everywhere. They're not hard to find. Just google names like Charles G. and David H. Koch, Robert J. Perry, T. Boone Pickens, Richard Mellon Scaife, Harold Simmons…and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

What is the truth? The very sad, profound truth in all this, Deroy Murdock (TH, July 21) aside, is that "screaming 'racism'" in 2010 is not at all "delusional." For racism is alive and well in twenty-first-century America and, I fear, getting worse.

What is the truth? The "Tea Party," conceived and birthed last year by billionaire lobbyists and nurtured by ideologues like those at Fox as a vehicle to bring down health care legislation and, ultimately, the Obama Administration, has become a seedbed for such racism, hijacking the legitimate concerns of its many well-meaning followers. For me, that racism is manifest in the movement's call to "take back our country." One has to ask "Who are we and from whom are we taking back our country?"

And, like Langston Hughes, I have to ask whether that America was ever mine? For, like Hughes, the America I seek has yet to be. It is the America of his majestic Let America Be America Again and, I have to believe, of Ronald Reagan's vision of that "shining city on a hill." As Hughes wrote from the pain and sorrow of the pre-Civil Rights era:

O, let America be

America

again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

Despite all the laws and all the progress and all the delusions of the Murdocks of the world who weren't there and don't remember, we are still struggling to reclaim that America that has yet to be.

Please, Mr. President, lead us in that struggle. Give that speech we now need. Open the dialogue we now yearn for. Speak our shared truth from our painfully shared history. Call us to our better selves.

Yes, we can! Can you?

ILL FARES THE LAND

2010-04-21T11:52:00.001-07:00

Tony Judt is an extraordinary man who has written an extraordinary book. Educated at Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, he is the preeminent historian of post-war Europe and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and, now, New York University. A Labor Zionist in his youth, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the '67 War, he has been one of the harshest critics of recent Israeli policies.

He is also dying. He doesn't name the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) that has left him completely paralyzed, referring to his predicament only obliquely in the book's acknowledgements as "the unusual circumstances in which this book was written."

And, my, what a book he has written! Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penquin, 2010, $25.95) cuts to the problematic core of today's America. Must reading for new generations of Americans who have no memories of the New Deal and the Great Society and those of us who do, it is intellectually compelling and morally profound – a call to action for those who believe in a common good, in community and solidarity, and in redeeming our fading ideals in a time of greed and incivility. It is written with the honesty, the moral clarity, and urgency of a dying man who loves his country and believes in collective action to save its soul.

Judt derives his title from a 1770 Oliver Goldsmith poem – "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay" – an abbreviated statement of our problem that he expounds upon in the first dozen and one lines of the book:

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this…."

No we cannot. In the 235 pages that follow, Judt makes clear why not and what we can – and must – do about it.

FROM A SERMON ON HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

2010-04-10T16:25:00.001-07:00

For Christians, April 11 is the first Sunday after Easter. But, in the Holy Land, the calendar reminds us, it is also Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaSho'ah…a time to recall in sorrow man's capacity for evil. At noon, the sounds of sirens will mix with those of church bells around Jerusalem. And, as the confusing cacaphony subsides, a now-old cry - "Never again!" – will echo through suddenly silent streets and alleys…leaving us to wonder: What we to make of those words? What are we to do with them?

In Fatal Embrace, Mark Braverman draws our attention to the Holocaust and to the "parallel crises" that face us in its wake – as Jews and as Christians. The Jewish crisis, he says, is the struggle to untangle the exclusivist narrative of a chosen people from the universal moral/ethical message of the prophets. The Christian crisis entails the struggle to rid the church of millennia of anti-Jewish bias in its teachings.

"What anti-Jewish bias?" some ask. Consider today's Gospel. Why were "the doors of the house where the disciples had met… locked?" They were locked "for fear of the Jews;" not the Romans…the Jews. And why were the Jews to be feared? Consider our reading today from Acts. The Apostles had begun preaching in the name of Jesus around Jerusalem and in the Temple itself. It got them arrested…here a second time. And in his questioning of them, the high priest's voice rises to anger pitch: "We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man's blood on us."

That is the infamous "blood libel" that, from the beginning, gave rise to anti-Semitism. It was, we were told again and again, the Jews who killed Christ. His blood was on their hands and, for that, they were to be dispersed and despised for all time.

That libel festered as a darkness in the heart of European Christianity over the centuries. For years, I lived in its shadow…in Munich, just a few miles from Dachau and a few more from Oberammergau, where every Lent John's Passion was played out by hooked-nosed actors shouting "Crucify him! Crucify him!"…and in Krakow, just an hour's drive from Auschwitz where such anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust.

The uniqueness of the Holocaust lies not just in the magnitude of the crime, the horror of which has indelibly stamped a sense of insecurity and victimhood on the souls of Jews, but also in the nature of the discontinuity – the break – it represents in the Christian experience of anti-Semitism. The subsequent sense of guilt among Western Christians has been profound.

In neither instance – the fear or the guilt – have the consequences always been healthy. They have given rise to the "parallel crises" that Braverman contends cloud our vision of current realities in the Holy Land and prevent frank discussion of the day-to-day injustices inflicted upon Palestinians there. They are, he adds, crises that must be addressed within our separate traditions – the theme of justice voiced by the prophets and of love embodied by Jesus. That, he says, may take longer for Jews than Christians. But, he adds, "Don't wait for us. You work on your problem. We'll work on ours."

So what is the Christian problem in this regard? It is that the have not really addressed – not historically nor theologically – the anti-Judaism in John and Acts and Paul; it is also how, over the centuries, that failure – that sin of omission – warped into the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust.

Since the Holocaust, christians have swept the facts of early church history under the rug, preferring instead new theological stratagems designed to stress the continuities between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old Testament and the New – stratagems that, in their guilt-ridden enthusiasm, blur the discontinuities and reduce Jesus to but one in a long list of Jewish prophets. Anti-Semitism has been replaced by fawning philo-Semitism. Jews – and by extension,

Israel

– can do no wrong.

That, Braverman says, does Jews no favors. Instead, he says, it "thwarts Jewish renewal by insulating us from the painful process of self-reflection about the effects of particularlism and exceptionalism."

And it does Christians no favors. Instead, it enables us to avoid facing and dealing with our real guilt. We have locked the Holocaust in the hermetically sealed box of another time and place. And we have fobbed off the consequences onto another people – the Palestinians – who had nothing to do with the crime.

It didn't happen here. It didn't happen on our watch. We twenty-first-century Californians had nothing to do with it. Like Pilate, we can wash our hands of the whole affair. The Germans did it. And they did it more than sixty years ago.

"Not so fast, not so easy," warns Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish Jew and sociologist. In Modernity and the Holocaust, he writes;

…the exercise in focusing on the Germaness of the crime as on that aspect in which the explanation of the crime must lie is simultaneously an exercise in exonerating everyone else, and particularly everything else. The implication that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were a wound or a malady of our civilization – rather than its horrifying, yet legitimate product results not only in the moral comfort of self-exculpation, but also in the dire threat of moral and political disarmament. It all happened 'out there' – in another time, another country. The more 'they' are to blame, the more the rest of 'us' are safe, and the less we have to do to defend this safety. Once the allocation of guilt is implied to be equivalent to the location of causes, the innocence and sanity of the way of life of which we are so proud need not be cast in doubt.

Those of you who attended the Taize service Good Friday evening may have noticed that there were tears behind my eyes, as we sang "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord." Those tears were there, because I cannot escape the theology of that hymn or the truth of Bauman's wisdom.

It wasn't just the Jews – or the Romans – who killed Jesus. We all did. We were all there.

And it wasn't just the Germans of a certain era who had the capacity to kill six million Jews. In our hearts of darkness, we are all capable of similar crimes. Need I mention the genocide in which millions of Native Americans were killed, the centuries-long crime of slavery, the concentration camps in which we confined our Japanese Americans, or the hatred so many of us harbor for the Muslims in our midst.

Only when we confront the universality of evil and embrace the redemptive theology that proceeds from the resurrected Jesus, will we be able to deal in a healthy way with the guilt that is our Christian Holocaust problem.

And only when we accept that Jesus – the Christ – is far more than just the product of his Jewishness, but rather its fulfillment…the New Adam who represents the break in human history through which the exclusive God of the Jews becomes the God of all…only then will we be able to help Jews deal with their Holocaust problem in a healthy way – to break the bonds of exclusivity and to embrace the universality of the one God we all worship.

In that instance, we – all God's children – can say with new understanding, new fervor – "Never Again!" Never again for any of God's children – not Jews…in Israel, not Christians in Darfur or El Salvador, not Buddhists in Cambodia, not Hindus in Mumbai, and not Palestinians, be they Muslims in Gaza or Christians in Bethlehem.

WHAT I DID FOR EASTER

2010-04-10T15:45:00.001-07:00

I had intended Holy Saturday to be a day of rest and reflection. It was instead disturbed by an open carry gun rally in Vallejo's waterfront park - an event chronicled on video at http://ibvallejo.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=786&Itemid=1 (What does a deacon do? Check out the last five minutes) and commented on below.

Easter Sunday turned out to be very special, not so much because of the pleasant service, the kids, the new faces, and the potluck at Christ the Lord, but because of the moving Open Cathedral in the cold and drenching rain – our third Easter, our second anniversary of faithfulness in the Tenderloin. We were all wet and chilled to the bone, but it was really "Church!" There were new faces there, too, and old ones…our regulars. Souls were touched and moved and John Patrick, a congregant, wrote on the back of a paper plate:

More Than Just About A Bunny

Here we collect and gather this day

As we find a connection to fulfil what we say

Perhaps we pray for the spirit of Christ

who has risen again

Provided we enjoy and share this Easter

with family and friend

You can depend upon the season to be

inclement or even sunny

Eager to worship and equip those in need…

And maybe see the Easter Bunny

And its funny and fair all the unconditional love

So aware of the children of God who are here

Thankful and pure

A sandwich can be the cure

Everyone will stay within this open circle

so strong

Realizing it's not surprising

that I could write them a song.

Nancy Pennekamp, the other deacon at the service, took some photos. Here's one:

On Monday I slept late.

Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Spring.

APPALLING

2010-04-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, that massive display of weaponry on Vallejo's waterfront last Saturday by an open carry group based in Martinez was appalling. It was, as intended, an insult to Vallejo and a provocation to its people. It was, in every way, appalling.

How else to describe a hundred armed men strutting their stuff in a public park where kids were playing football and riding their skateboards and moms were pushing their strollers on a sunny holiday weekend. When I pointed this out to an armed man from Pittsburg, I was told "Kids have to learn." What, I asked do they have to learn? To fear, to take the law into their own hands, to be ready to kill?

How else to describe the inappropriateness of such in-your-face behavior on the holiest weekend on the Christian calendar; of a pistol-packing "Christian minister" from Benicia - barely old enough to shave - spouting talking points about Jesus the tough guy; of someone else in the crowd saying that, had he had a gun, Jesus would not have had to die on the cross…that, had he had a gun, "things would be different." They sure would!

How else to describe the danger of putting guns into the hands of people who, as demonstrated in the hundreds of anonymous foul-mouthed postings on the Times-Herald's website, are full of anger, fear, and hatred. Among them, I fear, there are some who may be emotionally unstable. We've seen the fearful results around the country. We don't need to play with such fire in Vallejo. We've suffered enough.

I found appalling not only the behavior of these fearful, angry men (and the 3-4 women among them), but also the "hear no evil, see no evil" behavior of our city officials and agencies.

Why, for example, did the Greater Vallejo Recreation District approve a permit for such a provocation? This by an agency whose mission statement touts its commitment "to increasing the amount of fun and recreation in your daily life" and its goal "to build community and enhance quality of life." How did such a public display of weaponry "build community" in Vallejo or "enhance the quality of [our] life?'

Why was the "only concern" of the Vallejo Police Department, according to the Times-Herald, that the "unloaded guns" of the group might be "taken from them?" Did they not note the statement of a member of the group that, in the event of such an incident, the "picknickers" would not "just stand still?" Were they satisfied that, in such an event, the armed men in our park "would not necessarily resort to loading their weapons and shooting at potential robbers." "Not necessarily?" Not necessarily!

Where were the uniformed police to inspect the weapons of these people to ensure that they were indeed unloaded? Is our Police Department not aware that section (e) of the California open carry statute reads as follows:

"In order to determine whether or not a firearm is loaded for the purpose of enforcing this section, peace officers are authorized to examine any firearm carried by anyone on his or her person or in a vehicle while in any public place or on any public street in an incorporated city or prohibited area of an unincorporated territory. Refusal to allow a peace officer to inspect a firearm pursuant to this section constitutes probable cause for arrest for violation of this section."

Did they care? Did they care that those of us in the park who disagreed with the armed open carry advocates felt threatened, having no assurance – save their word – that all their weapons were unloaded?

Or was there a plain clothes officer in the crowd, as the unmarked black muscle car suggested? Were that the case and the plain clothes officer tried to take someone's gun, might the officer be mistaken for a "robber," precipitating perhaps a shootout among the children and fishermen on the waterfront? Must the average citizen live with such uncertainty.

Finally – and most appalling of all – was the total silence of the clergy of our city's churches. Where – in God's name – were you? Will you be there next month when the open carry group promises to return? Will you speak out in the meantime to head off another such provocation? And that's what they seek – to provoke an incident. They don't take their guns to Danville, Walnut Creek, or Orinda. No, they target instead Richmond, Vallejo, and, next week, San Francisco's Castro.

Let's not play into their hands or roll over next time they apply for a permit. Are we, as some of our ministers insist, a "City of God" that cares about its children? Or are we a city of violence and vigilantes? Do we have any pride or backbone? Do we care about our reputation or will we remain content to let others smear us as the "Armpit of the Bay?"

And that $600? Send it back to Brad Huffman as quickly as possible. It's blood money. We're not for sale! Not that cheaply!

ONE YEAR LATER

2010-01-20T20:24:00.001-08:00

FROM A SERMON ON ISAIAH, MARTIN, AND AMERICA

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest…

Isaiah 62:1

A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand….If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now.

Roger D. Hodge, "The Mendacity of Hope" Harper's, February 2010

The preacher bears a great responsibility. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the preacher must "articulate the longings and aspirations of the people." "Somehow," he added in Memphis in that last sermon of his life, "the preacher must be an Amos, and say, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.'"

Like Martin, a good preacher must be a prophet and a witness. But I'm no Martin. And, facing the obligation he places on anyone who would stand before a congregation, I'm inclined to sit down and shut up for fear of embarrassment. But knowing how great are the problems of the poor and how deep are our shared longings and aspirations in this time of war and economic decline, I feel I have no choice. And I haven't been afraid for a long time. As Martin said in another sermon – on Vietnam – "A time comes when silence is betrayal." By my lights that time has come in America.

It does no good – not even for Jesus – to say, when that time comes, when the "fierce urgency of now" is upon us, "My hour has not yet come." We do not choose the time. The time chooses us. Such a time had come for the Jewish people in Isaiah's time. The Jews had just been liberated from their exile in Babylon and were about the business of restoring their kingdom in Jerusalem. It was a time of opportunity, but the dangers of backsliding into old ways of doing things – old ways that had brought them down before – were great. It was a critical hour in the life of Judah. It was time for Isaiah to speak his message of encouraging hope: "For Zion's sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her vindication goes forth as brightness, and her salvation as a burning torch."

That message – be true to your aspirations and you will be a great people – was one Martin preached in his time and one that we would do well to heed in our time. For we too have been in exile this past decade …and, I would argue, since Martin was taken from us. We are emerging from forty years of endless war – overlapping, futile, and, for the most part, unworthy wars…wars that have left us mired in Afghanistan and facing enemies on every continent. We are emerging also from decades of rampant greed and reckless risk-taking that have produced a Great Recession in an America we hardly recognize any more.

Over the past decade alone, there has been NO net gain in job growth – Nada! - and every tenth American seeking a job can't find one. Middle class Americans are making less than we did a decade ago and one in every eight of us is on food stamps. One in every four homeowners is "under water" and home foreclosures have reached crisis proportions. What kind of crisis? What does a crisis looks like? In my community, Vallejo, it looks like this – four pages of foreclosure notices on one day last week…and every day since. No wonder we've rediscovered layaways, clipping coupons, and doing without so many things we once deemed necessary. And our newspapers – when they're not running foreclosure notices – have become outlets for national fencing operations eager to take our "unwanted" things right here in Concord or Emeryville. We've all seen the ads – "Bring us your gold, your family jewels. We pay top dollar!"

No wonder, at this moment of crisis, that the national mood is one of fear, the worst fear being that we might not be up to the task – an "uneasy feeling," a "sinking feeling," as the New York Time's Bob Herbert put it two weeks ago, "that important opportunities are slipping from the nation's grasp." We are, he said, "escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into a panic mode over an attempted act of terror and squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society." And, he added, "If America can't change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue."

Indeed it will…if we don't change. But you and I – we – know better. We have had our cold shower. Our eyes are wide open. We are poised to act. Our hour has come. We dare not squander this opportunity to build a better society. As Christians and as Americans we must give voice to our longings and aspirations. We are at another moment when silence is betrayal. Our old ways of doing things no longer work. We must find new ways…new ways that reflect those longings and aspirations.

What sorts of new ways? Jim Wallis of Sojourners warns us against just seeking to get back to "normal." Noting that "normal" is what got us into this situation, Wallis urges us to craft a "new normal" – one consistent with our Christian and national values of justice, equality, charity, and solidarity with our fellow human beings. Rugged individualism never really worked – except in B movies – and it won't work now.

In his latest book - Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street – Wallis says we must rediscover our sense of community, our spirit of cooperation. We must remind Washington, Sacramento, and each other that "car[ing] for the poor is not just a moral duty but is critical for the common good." It's time, he adds to "stop keeping up with the Joneses and start making sure the Joneses are okay." We have, he concludes, arrived "at a transformational moment, one of those times that comes around only very occasionally. We don't want to miss this opportunity."

Just down the road in Berkeley, Rabbi Michael Lerner has been preaching the same message on the pages of Tikkun and in his Network of Spiritual Progressives. He calls for a "New Bottom Line" in our economic life – one that measures success by how we live and care for each other rather than by what we accumulate for ourselves. Advocating a new Global Marshall Plan, he urges us to scrap the current security paradigm – the one we've operated on throughout my lifetime – security through domination – in favor of a new paradigm of security through generosity, respect and caring.

Once before – before this current crisis became so apparent – I preached this message in a church in San Francisco. At the door, after the service, an angry young man in a blue suit and power tie – a millionaire I later learned – stuck his finger in my face and growled "That was naïve, incredibly naïve!"

I have to ask, however, is it being naïve or is it being faithful to preach a Gospel that asks "Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?" Is it being naïve or is it being faithful to hope that we as a people might be numbered among those who did just that for the least of our brothers and sisters and that we as a nation might be "a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord."

This week we have seen Jesus hungry and thirsty and naked and, yes, dying on the streets of Port au Prince and our response thus far suggests that we may be capable of a new paradigm, a new normal, a new bottom line. And we have reacted in ways that give one hope. As the soldiers of the 82^nd Airborne they fanned out about Port au Prince to restore calm and distribute food and drink, their commander, a Col. Anderson, said: "We're here to do as much good and as little evil as possible." Talk about the paradigm of domination crumbling before one of generosity, respect and caring!

And talk about "making sure the Joneses are okay!" Witness all the doctors, nurses, and civilian aid workers who are now deployed, all bringing a measure of generosity, respect and caring. Then there are all of us – here in this sanctuary of peace and solidarity – opening our checkbooks to unseen brothers and sisters and our hearts to those among us who grieve for family in Haiti.

Our hearts are broken…broken open…open to Martin's plea that April night in Memphis: "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness…. Let us rise up…with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation."

May we not be found wanting in the face of that challenge.

TIME FOR PLAIN TALK ABOUT ISRAEL

2010-01-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

In light of a January 10 attack on Representative George Miller (D-CA) in the Vallejo Times-Herald by Larry Grossman (http://www.timesheraldonline.com/guestopinions/ci_14160252), an attack that echoes the strident propaganda of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), it's time for some plain talk about Israel, Palestine…and America.

Let me preface my remarks by saying something about myself, for I know what will come my way in the wake of what I have to say.

Sunday night, after reading Mr. Grossman's un-nuanced, one-sided diatribe, I happened to watch again Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." It's a movie I can't watch without a shiver up my spine, for I know its cobble-stoned streets and bloody fields like the back of my hand. I was the American Consul in Krakow, the first American Consul there. I walked those streets and the fields of Plaszow. I walked that railroad track in Birkenau with William Styron and represented America at memorial ceremonies in Auschwitz. I also walked the Jewish cemetery in Krakow, alone with the community leader of the then-dying Jewish remnant of a thousand…a thousand from a pre-war community of 100,000. I protested to the Polish authorities about the condition of that and other graveyards throughout Galicia. And I prayed at services in the Rehmuh Synagogue, cantor-led services, because, in 1973, there wasn't a single rabbi in all of Poland.

And I can sleep better at night knowing that, thanks to such efforts begun forty years ago, there is, once again, a thriving Jewish community in Poland. No, I don't need any lessons about the Holocaust.

Nor do I need any lessons about Israel, "the quintessential post-Holocaust response to centuries of powerlessness and discrimination." For I have visited Israel twice, staying at kibbutzim on the Lebanese border and in the Huleh Valley and, standing on the Golan Heights, looking across that valley to Lebanon. I understand the average Israeli's fear – a fear generated by geography and history.

But I have also visited Palestine – from Nablus in the north to Bedouin villages south of Hebron - and just a year ago experienced first-hand the powerlessness and discrimination visited upon Palestinians in a thousand daily humiliations. And I recall with pain standing at the thirty-foot high wall surrounding Gaza, as a convoy of NGO vehicles tried to make its way through the Eretz Crossing to break the now two-year-long blockade that has penned 1.5 million people into an outdoor prison 20 miles long by 6 miles wide.

I recall also that cynical and callous onslaught against Gaza – "Cast Lead" - that began under cover of Christmas a year ago and continued until the last breath of the Bush Administration, killing over 1,300 men, women, and children. No amount of vitriolic rhetoric from "Israel's traditional supporters" (read AIPAC) can erase the images of the dead and maimed children or the truth contained the Goldstone Report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

To call the Goldstone Report a "kangaroo court" and to accuse the UNHRC of anti-Semitism is a calumny of the worst sort. Richard Goldstone, a Zionist Jew whose daughter lives in Israel, is a distinguished South African jurist, whose uncovering of the crimes of the apartheid regime formed the basis for that country's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Subsequently, he served as chief prosecutor of the war criminals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. His report on war crimes in Gaza was thorough, balanced, and well-documented. For the sake, not only of its standing in the world, but of its national soul, Israel would be well advised to address the issues raised by the report and stop throwing stones at its author.

Unfortunately, the United States voted against the adoption of the Goldstone report and pressured the Palestinian Authority to do so also – a move that led to an uproar among ordinary Palestinians and subsequently to the resignation of their moderate Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Indeed, we have stood virtually alone with Israel in vote after vote in the United Nations, the last such vote being against a December 18, 2009 UN General Assembly resolution "reaffirm[ing] the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine"…even though that reaffirmation reflects the two-state policy of the United States government. That vote was 171-6. With us – the six in Israel's corner – were the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau. Palau? Nauru? Really?! Increasingly, we – Israel and the United States – are standing out in our singularity and isolation vis-a-vis our allies and the settled body of international law.

Israel, however, has been isolated not by Representative Miller, J Street, or the Obama Administration, all of whom wish Israel well, but by the Likud government of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his racist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who have time and again undermined the two-state solution by the continued construction of illegal and provocative settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. In doing so they have, time and again, undercut moderate Palestinian leaders like Abbas and may soon find out that there are Palestinians even more extreme than Hamas.

Unlike Representative Steny Hoyer, who has made annual trips to Israel paid for by AIPAC's American Israel Education Foundation, George Miller has indeed demonstrated his independence, intelligence, and integrity by visiting Israel – and Palestine – with his eyes wide open and beholden to no one save the American people, especially the people of the 7^th District. He and J Street have stood with President Obama in seeking a two-state solution based on justice and mutual security and dignity for two long-suffering peoples. They recognize that support for Israel is not synonymous with AIPAC's knee-jerk, "unequivocal" support for Likud's extremist and self-defeating policies.

Those policies can only lead to a one-state solution that would lead, in turn, to the demise of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Demography would force Israel to choose between its Jewishness and its democracy. With a majority Palestinian population, an Israel that extended from the Mediterranean to the Jordan could only survive as an apartheid police state. That is not, I think, the sort of state that the United States could support. It certainly is not the sort of Israel I could support.

I urge all your readers to support Representative Miller, President Obama, and reasonable Israelis and Palestinians as they seek to head off such a disaster. The time is short and, for Israelis and Palestinians, the success or failure of this effort will be existential.

GAZA ON MY MIND

2009-12-28T20:16:00.001-08:00

Sunday evening at Union Square I joined the interfaith remembrance of Gaza's dead from a year ago. I was saddened by the line of loud and angry pro-Israel demonstrators across the street, stretching from Geary to Victoria's Secret in front of the St. Francis…and saddened maybe even more by the post-Christmas shoppers seemingly oblivious to what happened and is happening in Gaza.

There, at the start, was Miriam, a fifteen-year old Gazan, a faint smile on her face, surprised, it seemed, by her own power, as she described the loss of her eye and her father.

It was a Jew – a later speaker from Jewish Voice for Peace – who drew our attention to a sign across the street that read "Jews don't turn the other cheek." But I could recall one Jew who did. His birthday was, I recalled, two days earlier.

It came time to light the candles. A Jewish lady gave me a candle she brought. I lit it from the flame of Miriam's candle. We all smiled.

Candles in hand, we marched silently around the square. I tried to make eye-contact with the uninformed, uncaring shoppers. A few took flyers, but most hurried by in silence.

Having completed our circuit of the square, the shouted insults from in front of the St. Francis became louder, angrier. As the two groups, lined up on either side of Powell, began shouting at - past - each other, I drifted off into the darkness of the square, past the children gawking at the giant tree, past the skaters on the ice...silent thoughts of Gaza on my mind.

Gaza was still on my mind this morning, as I engaged in my Monday morning ritual of plowing through the Sunday New York Times over breakfast. There, in the "Books of the Times," was a surprisingly frank and favorable review of Joe Sacco's new graphic novel - Footnote in Gaza - about two earlier massacres, forgotten "footnotes" to the 1956 Suez War. Though I was a teenager at the time, I remember them well. They were the stuff of the beginning of an education. (The review, well worth reading, is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Cockburn-t.html?scp=1&sq=joe%20sacco&st=cse. It may add to your education.)