He's Back!

Who know what political calculations may have taken place among Barack Obama insiders before he expressed his opinion about the mounting pressure to get Hilary Clinton to retire from the race for president?

Who knows? Maybe he simply said what he believes?

Whatever the intention or motive, once again the man comes across as a class act.

"Don't leave the race on my account," he said with that poker face calm. He went on to say that she has a perfect right to stay in the race as long as she wishes and that, like him, her name appears on the ballot and that's the way we decide these things in this country.

Amidst all the hype and hysteria in both Clinton's and Obama's camps, not to mention the blogsphere lighting up over the subject hourly, he appears as what we have needed in a national figure and lacked for many a moon:

a non-anxious presence.

We have a process, the process is going ahead as it was designed, uncertainty is hard, but we can live through this.

What a pleasure to hear a politician speak sensibly from the heat of the battle.

If we can trust reports coming from Zimbabwe since their general election on Saturday, it seems pretty clear the party that has been in power since they won their independence in 1980 - Zanu PF - and the man who has led that part for all those years - Robert Mugabe - have been soundly trounced.

I have to confess this comes as big a surprise to me as it must to Mugabe. Both because I never believed Mugabe would tolerate even the appearance of opposition victory, and because I have ben reading the blogs coming from Zimbabweans in the country and around the world who scold the west and the media for hounding Mugabe whom - a wrecked economy and unparalleled corruption aside - they still regard as the heroic guerilla who actually defeated white colonialists and gave the reins of power to the black majority.

The long delay in an official announcement of the election results is unsettling. My guess is that there is a chaotic fight going on within the ranks of the ruling party, both about whether - with the world looking over their shoulder - they can pull off yet another stolen election, and whether they really want to perpetuate the disastrous rule of the 84 year old Mugabe who has trashed the country while amassing a personal fortune.

It is hopeful that they have not simply announced Mugabe's reelection.

It is scary they have not acknowledged defeat.

Whatever comes from this, a corner has been turned.

The nation that at its founding was known as the jewel in Africa's crown, the breadbasket of southern Africa, the happy proof that an African nation, even though arbitrarily carved by western colonialists from tribes with ancient enmities, could come together and rule itself. The fears of the small white minority who held an inordinate share of the best farmland and wealth, were assuaged when Mugabe - in his inaugural address - called the new nation a welcome place for people of all races who were willing to help the nation.

I have been mightily chastened by the blogs that bitterly ask why the west should suddenly, after years of neglect, take such a big interest now? They suggest it is because Mugabe actually went forward with redistributing the white farmland among poor black peasants. And, so this thinking goes, we white westerners want the land back.

Never mind that the land now lies fallow. That the agricultural exports - once the largest source of foreign currency for the infant nation - have given way to starvation and dependence on handouts from international relief agencies. Or that inflation of 100,000% (how could they measure such a number?) has caused 80% unemployment and a drop in life expectancy from the early 70s to the mid 30s.

The strength of anger that built up over the centuries of white exploitation of Africa (not to mention the legacy of the slave trade) is not going to disappear simply because Mugabe does, or because we mouth good intentions toward whomever his successor will be.

I fell in love with the country when i lived there briefly more than 20 years ago, and have stayed in touch with (white) Zimbabweans since. I dream of a day when the suffering will end for them. I have dared hope this election might be the start.

But it will take a rethinking of the entire western legacy in all of Africa - and a serious diet of crow - for the long nightmare of Zimbabwe and the other peoples of Africa to trust and welcome us into their lives.

When I wake with a queasy stomach or a chill wave of fear, it is always about the same thing.

Change.

The circumstances vary widely; money, health, war, marriage, mortality.

But the issue is always the same. Not that it is a surprise. Just that somehow I let myself get suckered once again into thinking that if I just worked hard enough, was good enough, brave enough, smart enough, I could somehow make things stay the same.

Not that that would be such a good thing. But - so shaky ego tells me - at least I know about what is. The old devil you know. How can I know what might be?

So it gives me the willies.

Makes me uneasy to think that is what is going on with the wildly fluctuating financial markets. Or the chaos in Iraq. Or the three candidates left standing so far in our endless presidential campaign.

Surely those huge players, who will determine the shape of our nation and the world ahead, are working on hard data produced by brilliant people who have a good grasp of the forces to be considered.

Nope. To be human is to fear change. We all say we welcome it. None of us does.

But it is possible to discipline one's self to live in the understanding that change is certain. And to make a willed decision that even though I am not in control of it, and can't predict its shape, because it has brought me this far, I will trust it.

The other choices are despair, anger.

That much is a choice.

My cousin sent me a video link of a woman brain researcher who describes in vivid detail her own stroke. If you have any interest in the mysteries of our brain (she actually holds a human brain in her hands at one point in her talk, and it looks pretty fresh, which makes one wonder), you would do well to watch this.

Oh my!

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229

Perhaps the most arrogant and self-defeating task imaginable is thinking one might challenge the dominant culture.

Or the assumptions that underlie it.

But, what the hell. Here Goes.

The most conflict I faced as a parish priest over thirty years was not challenging creeds, but questioning the most basic icon of American life.

Growth.

My tenure, from seminary to retirement (1963 - 1996), marked the period in which The Episcopal Church went from being a small but influential piece of American life (more presidents and senators), a mark of achievement, or at least inherited money and influence (The Republican Party at prayer, until FDR burst that picture), to a church in rapid decline in numbers and influence.

At the same time the formerly small, mostly rural, mostly southern, biblically literal churches, began to grow, until they so far outnumbered Episcopalians that no serious political candidate dared run without doing obeisance to their agenda.

Which resulted in every search committee in ever parish I ever was interviewed by, making clear their wish for a rector who would increase the numbers. People and dollars.

Although I was cautious about making extravagant promises - I knew I would have to live with them if I got the job, I was a clever candidate, seductive and fun, and never outright said I doubted I, or anyone else, could turn the tide of our decline.

Reminded me of a high school football coach who, when I asked him what happened when our school's team lost to her traditional rivals 56-0, said, "You just can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit."

But in at least three of the four churches where I worked over the decades, there came a sticky moment in a meeting of the governing body, when someone - usually the most successful, most feared and most envied entrepreneur - pointing out yet another budget that was dipping into endowments, said it was time for a business plan that would lead to church growth.

Even though church growth became the mantra of the church around the nation (not so much around the globe, as the Anglican Church in Africa showed dazzling growth), I raised the question of why we would make growth a part of our mission? The answer seemed obvious enough: Matthew 25 in which Jesus is reported saying, "Go ye therefore into all the world and make disciples of every nation."

I challenged not only the authenticity of that Bible verse (I believe it was added later when the church wanted to become larger) but the very notion of getting bigger as getting better.

Now I haven't time here - and you will not keep on with this much longer, if you are still with me - to spell it out in detail.

We might go back to the most basic matters.

We arrive here unexpectedly. Maybe our parents expected us, but I sure don't remember making plans to be here. We are little, pink, supple, programmed for growth of all sorts for perhaps three or four decades.

Being an organism alongside all others, we are subject to entropy. Gravity, weakening of cell walls, gradual loss of tight cellular organization, all contribute to a change in direction, a reversing of the early process.

Perhaps because consciousness, self-awareness, what Freud named the ego, we valued the early process and dreaded the later process.

But must we?

For whatever it may mean, I am finding the chapter in which I now find myself (67) - for all its undeniable diminishment of powers and weakening of connective tissues - the richest yet. As I anticipate the winding down and ultimate dissolution of this miraculous arrangement of cells known as me, I see no reason to lose trust in the process that brought me here and has carried me this far.

I think our worship of growth is robbing us of the fulness of experience.

Bell Tolls

To hurry pain is to leave a classroom still in session. To prolong pain is
to remain seated in a vacated classroom and miss the next lesson. -Yahia
Lababidi, writer (b. 1973)

*******

Some of you will remember Kayla, the eight year old girl who lived next door to us in Vermont, killed in a car crash about this time three years ago.

Erin, her mother, was driving a big truck on Route 9. Kayla and her two cousins, Erin’s sister’s children, were with them. A man in a pickup, a man with a troubled, drug addled history, came across the line toward them, seeming to deliberately steer into them. Erin took her truck off the road as far as she could to the right; he steered harder into her. In the collision he and Kayla were killed instantly. Erin and the two other children survived.

Erin has been through several surgeries. The charismatic orthopedic surgeon who fixed my wrist has given Erin back the use of her right arm. She reigns in Erin’s and my hagiography.

In ways peculiar to tiny rural towns and international celebrities, we all somehow knew that Kayla, Erin and Brad’s only child, would remain an only child. We sorrowed that the reproductive possibilities had closed down for both of them after Kayla’s birth.

We see Kayla’s grave from our kitchen window, a shrine, a photo of Kayla, a piece she wrote in school about her parents engraved on her stone. Children leave flowers and toys. Lacey and I love telling about Kayla showing up at our back door on Lacey’s birthday, wide smile, a wriggling snake in her hand, an offering she knew would disgust Lacey.

One morning last fall Lacey and I dropped by the site of a house friends are building. Brad’s uncle Kenny, legendary local stone mason, was making a wall. Gonna have new neighbors, he said. My heart sank. Everyone knows the odds against a marriage in which a child has died. I figured the worst. Unable to face each other after their horrendous loss, Erin and Brad were splitting.

They’re selling?

Nope. Babies. They’re having twins. But how? Kenny shrugged, smiled.

In ways peculiar to tiny rural towns and international celebrities we somehow learned they had gone to the fertility clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital where the requisite substances were extracted from each of them, introduced in a Petrie dish and, once the cells showed enthusiasm for rapid division, implanted in Erin’s sister’s womb.

Where those cells not only continued dividing into arms, legs, heart, lungs, but with bounty beyond reason two eggs, two sperm cells, in a gesture of unimagined abundance, took root. Beginning boys.

Who were born on Friday, Good Friday on the Christian calendar. 7 lbs 13 oz. and 7 lbs. 15 oz.

The next day we called our friend Celia whose sister Gloria has been on dialysis for 7 years waiting for a kidney. Two weeks ago a call in the middle of the night. Perfect match. But she had a hard time with the new organ, they worried she might reject it. We were reluctant to call. Finally did. Gloria was going that day to remove the shunt and return the machine that has been washing her blood all these years.

Erin I spoke about wrestling with Kayla dying and these two boys getting a run. I don’t think Gloria knows anything about whose kidney has given her life she had just about given up on.

Saturday morning I dropped in on Son, the Cambodian clock maker who has been laboring over my 19th century French repeater carriage clock for more than five years. He said it was the most screwed up clock he had ever seen, he wasn’t sure it could be set right. After two extended trips to Switzerland to hone his skills, three broken pivots, ordering parts from three places around the world, a year ago I said, Let’s throw in the towel.

Son refused. I stopped once a week to commiserate about the latest calamity. Saturday as I came through his front door, Son smiled and pulled the clock from beneath his work bench. I had forgotten what a pretty thing it is.

Remember the chime? he asked. I didn’t. He pushed the repeater button, the mellifluous tone stirred something vestigial in me.

Clock’s fixed, he said.

Last night I slept fitfully. There is no place in our small apartment too distant to hear the clock’s strike every half hour. After listening to it chime 4, 4:30, 5 and 5:30, 6am, I thought maybe it’s that clock keeping me awake.

I was content to lie and wait for the next strike.

Reading an article in Wired magazine - about climate change - the writer made reference to a couple of times when a change in the human situation made a difference in our impact on the earth's climate.

He said that during the Great Plague in the 14th century the CO2 level in the atmosphere dropped. The reason was because the number of human beings on the planet took a sudden precipitous drop.

And he wrote that, at about the same time, the European invasion of the North American continent (it's hard to think of it as an invasion, isn't it? I mean, after all, we live here; it's our home, right? But...) began the dying off, from diseases introduced by white people and from battle of 50 MILLION native Americans.

I have long wondered how many people were here before we came. I have never read mush about that number.

But 50 MILLION?

He doesn't say what period of time he means. But even if he starts as early as the arrival of the very first Europeans (maybe the 14th century?) and carries on through the first part of the 19th century, could the number reach 50 MILLION?

Had I been asked to guess I might have gone as high as 5 million, a tenth of that number.

Does anyone know whether the writer pulled a number out of his hat, or used some widely agreed upon number?

Could our legacy here be that wretched?

My step-son, Oakley, has an entry on his blog today - www.oakleybrooks.com/blog - that may provide a look at what it was Barack Obama was suggesting for this nation in his speech from Philadelphia.

Oakley and his wife are living in Banda Aceh on Sumatra in Indonesia. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims of any country in the world.

Aceh is remote from the capital, Jakarta and has a long standing separatist movement. It is where the tsunami came ashore that killed a quarter of a million people in Asia. Oakley's wife, Hayley, works with Mercy Corps, an NGO that is trying to help rebuild some of the economic infrastructure that was destroyed by the tsunami.

Oakley is a free-lance journalist. And one of his areas of focus is how an American can decipher a culture as different from ours as chalk from cheese.

The shorthand summary is that it can't be done. Oakley is the most affable, accessible of people, the reason he is such a successful journalist. He walks into a room and people notice him (he is 6'3") and are drawn to him. He greets them easily and warmly and they tell him all sorts of things. As a result his writing is full of insights I rarely find in most reporting.

He is an open person, non-ideological, fascinated by and accepting of endless variety in human culture.

But he is increasingly candid in his writing from Aceh (they have been there just over a year) that he is not going to penetrate the nuances of the culture of his neighbors. He is on very friendly terms with them, plays tennis, eats with them, goes to weddings, travels with them. From everything I can discern, he is truly friends with them.

But their inner workings remain impenetrable.

This is easy to see and understand when one is in another country. I have lived abroad a few times in my life, and one of the earliest and most important lessons was that, no matter how comfortable and at home I might feel, I wasn't at home and I ought not feel over comfortable. Because I really didn't understand my surroundings the way one does in one's own home.

It is less easy to see or accept the same thing within our own country.

Which is why I think Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech, perhaps unprecedented in American political history, will either mark the beginning of a new and different day for American political life, or the end of Obama's shot at the presidency.

He stood on that podium and called legitimate and worthy of our full attention the racial anger of both blacks and whites. Instead of saying - as he did in the beginning of his run - that there is no black or white America, only America, he said we are made up of people with different histories, some of which is because of racial difference.

He said the framers of the Constitution left it to later generations to figure out how to finish the revolution they began, based on all people (not just white men) being equal.

And, he said, we are that later generation, and the moment is now.

I commend Oakley's blog as a model of how one begins to live comfortably in one's own skin, owning and affirming one's own peculiar quirks, prejudices and wants, while looking with interest at the different ways in which those around you form those same things.

I have been searching my memory for the names of anyone in the four churches where I was pastor over thirty years who ran for public office.

I would put the political makeup of all four - conservatively - at 80% Republican. The rest would be a few Democrats, some serious economic and social libertarians, and a chunk of people who had not the slightest interest.

I have been trying to imagine someone from St. Paul's, Akron (St. Harvey's in-the-polo field, so called because it was in fact built on Harvey Firestone's old polo field), St. John's, Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. (the Church of the Presidents because, across Lafayette Park from the White House, every president since James Madison had at least come to church there once), St. Paul's, Dedham, Massachusetts (Precinct 1 at prayer, the old Yankee part of town), or St. James by-the-Sea in La Jolla, California (needs no explanation)... some parishioner trying to distance herself from the views of the pastor.

Me.

After my spirits soaring as they haven't in decades following Barack Obama's stirring speech in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, they have plummeted as I follow the responses.

The low point so far was Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President Bush, who, with a solemn expression on his face, expressed his disbelief that any patriotic American of any political persuasion would have remained in a church in which the pastor shouted, "They say 'God Bless America, but I say God Damn America."

Sometimes I see Barack Obama doing in macro what I did for 30 years in micro.

Believing that those things that rob people of rich life - prejudices, fear, resentment, envy, self-hatred - can, if faced, be turned to new possibilities, I tried to sneak up on them and devise ways to introduce them to new ways of looking at themselves and the world. Having slogged my way through endless hours of painful therapy, I understand the reluctance we all have to bring shameful or scary pieces of ourselves into the light.

So, being clever with words, having gained the authority of ordination, and with the mysteriously compelling ritual and beliefs of the church, I hoped to find ways for people who hated and feared change to take a turn at it.

In some ways it is a hugely arrogant vocation, fraught with peril.

But, since all that is available for filling pulpits is fallible humans, I figured somehow I had been appointed.

I quickly became known in all the churches as a liberal. Even in the sexy 60s, parishioners in those churches regarded liberals with deep suspicion. In those days there was an unmistakable class component. (In the Dedham parish one of my closest friends was Franklin D. Roosevelt's nephew and he, like his uncle, had been eschewed his whole life as a traitor to his class.)

When you think about it it makes perfect sense. A conservative is someone who wishes to protect the status quo. A liberal is one who looks for better, different ways to run the world.

If you have been rich and privileged from the start you are less likely to want change than if you are not.

Now, there lies the dilemma for Barack Obama.

It's not that he is attacking the rich on behalf of the poor or even the less rich. He will be accused of that, of fomenting class warfare, but that is a caricature of his agenda.

He perceives that all of us in this country - rich, poor, black, white, brown - have become estranged from ourselves and from the identity that our nation has always wanted to show to the world.

It didn't begin recently. In fact his tan skin reminds that - as he bravely and rightly pointed out in Philadelphia - the signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution claimed the most universal rights of all people any nation had claimed, but were perplexed about what to do about blacks and slaves. And women. So, as Obama explained, they left it for later generations, for us. (He didn't say what surely was so, that they didn't regard blacks as fully Men in the statement that all men are created equal)

Women at least and at last got the vote in 1920.

The question that has hung in the air for the 250 years of our nationhood is whether and how we might finish the work begun by our forebears. The civil rights movement signaled white middle class people that Jim Crow would no longer work well enough.

And the increased numbers of black Americans who are rich, in congress and in positions of responsibility (and a woman, a remarkable woman, Drew Gilpin Faust, an American history scholar who has just published a work of towering importance about the impact of the staggering number of casualties in the Civil War had on us.) is evidence that we have accepted the idea that race, nor gender, can be the defining issue in deciding who gets what position.

But our Iraq adventure - on the heels of Viet Nam - shows that we have not yet embraced the understanding that sheer power and wealth do not give a person nor nation the right (or the ability) to work its will on another.

Our worship of wealth, our portrayal to ourselves of the goal of life to be amassing as much money and power as possible, has alienated us from our "higher nature."

And it is to that higher nature, our better angel, that Barack Obama is trying to appeal.

Can he? When we are scared and angry, scared that we are losing our preeminence, and angry that the cause is the militancy of dark skinned people at home and around the world?

Can his preacher rhetoric, of hope, of community, a vision of living together in a common purpose rather than each of us struggling to gain more money and power, overcome our natural reluctance to risk something we don't really understand because it is formless, or at least amorphous?

I don't know.

I never felt I made much headway in any of the churches. In part because I was flying blind myself. I had never experienced what I was trying to persuade the congregation to embrace. But I had lived my life in the rich white ghetto that I went to seminary therapy to try to learn my way out of. And I believed with fierce conviction that making the move toward embracing rather than confronting, cooperation rather than combat, no matter where it might take us, would make for a better life than trying to posture my way into a place high on the rung of hierarchy.

I wonder if anyone in those congregations ever had to distance themselves from me?

Before I am influenced and no doubt confused by the blogosphere's take on the speech Barack Obama made yesterday in Philadelphia, this is my take.

It may have been the most significant speech given by a public figure in this country in my lifetime.

It will either lead to his being elected president or finish forever his chances.

He could have given a much more generic speech, distancing himself from his pastor's inflammatory remarks that have become the focus of a bored electorate, reassuring us that he is a true patriot, that his racial identity is insignificant and that he is just like all the rest of us.

He didn't.

He owned his identity with a bold clarity that John Kennedy dared not do in 1960.

He challenged us to let go our habit of ducking the discomfort of race as an ongoing and unfinished pice of the business of fulfilling the promises of the Constitution. He came right out and said the founding fathers could not resolve the issue and, even while they declared the proposition that all men are created equal (he didn't say that they surely understood "men" to mean white men), decided to allow the slave trade to continue for at least another 20 years. They left it to us, he said, to figure out how, as our history unfolded, to enlarge the promise to include all our citizens.

And now, with his candidacy which includes just about every race and ethnic group that makes up our polyglot nation, we have a very specific chance to take a step forward, a step closer to unpacking and excising the dirty little secret of America, racism.

And he warned that if we turn our backs on this chance, continuing the innuendo, snarky digs at his racial identity, playing to the worst fears and prejudices in us, then we will find ourselves in this same dilemma in the next election, and the next and the next.

I overheard a man this morning say the speech has cast him as a black candidate.

I don't disagree with that (although I continue to hold out for regarding him as mixed race, which makes him even more an appropriate symbol of America). But I did not understand him to be asking us to elect him because he is black. I heard him saying that, because of his multi-racial, multi-ethnic, even multi-national identity, he is uniquely positioned to understand and lead us from the hyper-nationalism that has led us into so many needless and intractable conflicts, to becoming a nation in concert with and alongside the other peoples and nations of the world.

It is a bold vision, perhaps unique for someone who would be president.

It will either inspire us to take a new step toward healing and wound that has festered in our nation's side since its beginning, and to embrace our common humanity with the rest of the world, or it will frighten us into wanting to slam the door on all this and turn back to a time when the oceans and our good fortune seemed to make us a charmed people who have no need of the rest of the world.

If we do the latter, the mess we find ourselves in as this president leaves office will look mild compared with what we will face four or eight years from now.

If we dare to take up this young man on his challenge, there are no guarantees about where it may take us. But at long last we will have chosen reality over illusion.

Tuesday in Holy Week March 18, 2008

Many go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
*******
Icarus
flew too
high
mere mortal presuming privileged powers preserved
for gods
offending them

the gods called for their crony
the sun
to melt his waxen wings dropping him back into our
earthly atmosphere splashdown
drowning him
restoring calm to the pantheon

the arrogant crusading young governor of NY
could have stepped outside his hotel and with a
strong slingshot hurled a stone down
16th street over Lafayette Park and hit the
White House

which is what he planned penning a piece for the
Washington Post
harassing the gods’ for draining of the people’s purse to protect
their perfidy

which worried them
until
his heat
hired the means to bring him down
leaving the gods
gods Barack beware

The flap over Barack Obama's pastor's inflammatory (if they were) remarks about the nation, now being held up as a reflection of Obama's possible views, strikes me as a perfect pig in a polk.

I would be fascinated to take a poll of all those who sat in congregations when I preached over the 30 years, asking how many of them mostly agreed with my take on things, and how many disagreed.

I might have been devastated at the time, but mostly people were too polite to tell me when they disagreed.

And likely thought it was not important enough to get into.

Four of those years were in a church in Washington, D.C., the so-called "Church of the Presidents" (because every president since James Monroe had worshipped there at least once.) Richard Nixon was in the White House and I had several friends who were on his staff. It was a joke among us that I loved to go to the White House for lunch or to play on the White House tennis court, even though everyone knew I not only was active in the anti-war movement (Viet Nam), but my social and economic views were almost the direct opposite of their administration.

I don't know whether clever spinners - either the Clinton or Republican spinners - can make these seemingly scary pieces from the sermons Obama's pastor preached, stick to him.

Not only should we all consider the context, a black church on Chicago's South Side, but that it is a church made up of thousands of people, undoubtedly with views as diverse as they.

Two of the churches where I served the longest hired pastors to follow me who were quite different from me. It often works this way. In both cases the people in the congregation who had cottoned to me, didn't to my successor. But I loved what one guy said to me about that. He said that when I came (I had followed a conservative man who had been there for 27 years) one of his friends said he hated me, found my preaching fatuous to incomprehensible.

"Tough shit," my friend had said to him. "I sat in those pews for 27 years listening to the drivel of that guy you thought was so great, paying my dues and keeping still. I really am grooving on this new guy, so you can suck it up for a few years."

"Now," he said, "they've brought in another guy I think is a newt. So it's my turn to grin and bear it again."

The parishioners clergy love are those who understand that pastors come and go. Some you love, some you hate, most you tolerate. But they hardly represent your picture of the world.

Here is a host of things that might scare the wits out of almost anyone:

- global warming
- intractable war between the western and Islamic worlds
- our economy sliding into a recession that deepens into a worldwide depression
- cancer evolving into a communicable disease (see the current Harper's)


Hardly an exhaustive list of ways we could lose our grip in this country or on our continued existence on the planet, but maybe enough for the moment.

So the question that never seems to find an answer: Is it Chicken Little shouting about the falling sky, or is it sensible concern?

Since I don't think anyone knows, let's try this:

Like every other species or phenomenon that has appeared on the earth, we are a fascinating arrangement of cells that has come for a season.

How long a season is unclear.

But not forever. Perhaps one of the above list will prove our final nemesis. More likely, it is still so far off and so more subtle and complex than our minds can track, that, while it (or they) may be in front of our nose already, they haven't yet tracked in our consciousness.

Turns out the vast emptiness of space, the 90% that is nothing, may turn out to be something. I love the name we have chosen for it- Dark Matter. Not that we can see or measure it. Its just that we notice forces affecting other bodies that require something in that seeming nothingness.

Economists are like mystics. They look at what has been, what is, and create language that evokes emotions about what may yet be.

And now we know that even time - that seemingly most reliable witness to old reliable linear reality - is an invention of the human mind, designed to give us confidence enough to make plans and invest money, have babies, go to college, borrow money and marry.

And then we run into that host with which this entry began.

And are reminded that not only do we not own or manage it, but we really have no more understanding of what it is, where it is headed or where it may end up, than does a new born of what lies ahead for her lifetime.

So the choice is between anger, despair, hopelessness, and going straight ahead into the mystery with wonder.

It's the wonder that makes it worth doing.

Although I don't know the copy write laws for cyberspace, at the risk of violating them, I am copying Rabbi Michael Lerner (the spokesman for Tikkun) on the treatment of Governor Spitzer's scandal. It is nuanced, raises the right questions and concerns, and shows why the tradition of learned rabbis serves a larger community than even Judaism...


Tikkun  to heal, repair and transform the world
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner Join or Donate Now!

Elliot Spitzer and America's Ethical Perversity
             by Rabbi Michael Lerner
 
 The cross-the-political-spectrum attacks on Elliot Spitzer and the intensity of the demands that he resign his office show just how far the  Right-wing sexual moralizing has been able to trump any other kind of ethical reasoning in American society.
 
 Going to a prostitute is legal in some states and some countries around the world, and is often the very arrangement that saves families from splitting up whose sexual energies have diminished but whose love is intact. It's not uncommon for men (and now increasingly women as well) who have achieved great power in our society by adopting an outer show of ruthless pursuit of power and influence (even, as in Spitzer's case, if the power is aimed at pursuing laudable ends) to feel a deep  emptiness and loneliness that is not addressed by friends or spouse, and hence to seek some kind of outside connection no matter how superficial that is not bound by previous rules and roles. Nevertheless, I and many others in the religious and spiritual world oppose that practice when it involves adultery or prostitution, because it depends on the objectification of another human being, so that sex is disconnected in ways that it should not be from a significant encounter with the spirit of God in the other or a deep recognition that is the only real way to overcome existential or situational alienation.
 
 Moreover, the trade in women for sexual purposes has frequently led to rape and abuse and the kidnapping of young women who are sold into sexual slavery. All of these outrageous practices are abhorrent and should be challenged. The flaunting of sexuality in the media, and the implicit message that the only real satisfaction comes from having the most physically attractive people as sexual partners, not only generates huge dissatisfaction even as it allows corporate advertise to become predators manipulating our personal sense of inadequacy to sell their products, but also generates desires that feed the sexual trade in women. Given this larger social context, until sexual satisfaction is so broadly available in our society that no one has to pay for it and so deeply tied to love that no one is objectified in the process, this kind of exploitation of women and degradation of sex is likely to continue. All of these practices foster the sexual predators of the contemporary world.
 
 So Elliot Spitzer deserves to be critiqued and ought to be doing deep atonement for what he did.  His previous moral arrogance and willingness when he had power to do so to prosecute others for their participation in creating prostitution rings makes him an easy target. We, in turn, might practice the forgiveness that our religious and spiritual traditions preach, particularly those of us who have been willing to honeslty face how flawed we ourselves are, and how at times we ourselves fail to embody in our actual practice with others the values that we publicly espouse. Humility and compassion are also part of the path of a spiritual progressive.
 
 But the intensity of the critique of the N.Y. governor, tied with the demand that he resign, shows more about American society's ethical perversity than about Spitzer.
 
 The President of the U.S. and the Vice President, working in concert with several other high ranking officers of our government, lied and distorted to get us involved in a war that has led to the death of over a million Iraqis, the displacement of 3 million more, the death of 4,000 Americans and the wounding of tens of thousands more. After token opposition in Congress, our elected representatives have overwhelmingly passed budgets funding this war, rather than refuse to fund any military projects until the President stopped the war and withdrew the troops.
 
 Meanwhile, our government has overtly engaged in torture, wiretapping of our phones, and violation of our human rights and the rights of people around the world. Senator Diane Feinstein and Senator Charles Schumer votes to confirm as Attonrey General a right-wing judge who refused to repudiate these crimes.
 
 The U.S. government has rejected every attempt to implement the Kyoto environmental agreements or to work out new agreements sufficiently strong to reverse environmental destruction that is certain to lead to new levels of flooding particularly in several poor countries around the world. The consequence: tens of millions of deaths.
 
 The Clinton Administration pushed, along with corporate support, a set of trade agreements that have devastated the farmers of many developing countries, forcing many off their farms and into city slums where their daughters and sons are often sold into sexual slavery.  The global economic system we have fostered has led to increasing gaps between the rich and the poor, so that over one out of every three people on the planet lives on less than $2 a day, 1.5 billion live on less than one dollar a day, and over 15,000 children die every day from malnutrition-related diseases and inadequate availability of medicine that is hoarded by the rich countries who can afford the prices made to ensure huge profits to the pharmaceutical industry.
 
 Health insurance companies and private medical profiteers are doing all they can to ensure that there will be no health care for tens of millions of Americans, unless that is provided in ways that guarantee corporate super-profits and thereby guarantee that the cost of health care paid through taxes will be huge and create anger at all government social welfare and well-being programs, leading to their likely de-funding.
People in the US have faced severe economic crises on a regional and soon on a national level because corporations move their centers of production to countries in Asia where they can exploit workers with less government or union interference and where they can destroy the environment with less societal restraints. Wild to achieve greater profits, corporations and the rich have managed to support politicians who lower the taxes on the rich, in the process bankrupting the public sector or severely reducing its ability to provide enough funds for quality education, health care, libraries, public transportation, and social welfare.
 
 That there is no outcry for these government officials and corporate leaders to resign immediately or be impeached, that there is no moral outrage at the entire system that produces this impact, is America's ethical perversity. Instead, the only crime against humanity that the media takes seriously and the politicians fear is being exposed for personal sexual immorality. While everyone basks in their own self-righteous demands on Spitzer, we all allow media and elected officials to fundamentally distort our ethical vision and play out our morality on the smallest of possible stages while ignoring the global and personal consequences of our larger ethical failures.
 
 Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine www.tikkun.org , Chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org ,  rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue-without-walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, and author of The Left Hand of God. He welcomes comments at RabbiLerner@tiikkun.org
 
If you agree with this perspective, call your local media and ask that it be presented alongside the mainstream views. And help us continue to provide alternative analyses by joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives (www.spiritualprogressives.org) and urging your friends to do so as well!  
 
 



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# posted by Blayney @ 1:27 PM 0 comments

At first I couldn't imagine the reasons for all that cheering coming from the canyon of Wall Street where the woes of a severe financial downturn have triggered only moans for some time.

Then I saw the story about Eliot Spitzer having been caught in a prostitution sting.

For years I have listened to my friends in the financial industry trash the former crusading NY Attorney General who made his mark taking on the giants of Wall Street.

Although I never particularly was drawn to his public persona - brittle and self-righteous - it seemed to me he served an important, and dangerous purpose. Because we worship money in our culture, taking on those who make billions is not something many choose to do. Not only because it is tricky and difficult - try matching the legal talent they can afford - but because we all admire and respect them even if we are sometimes reluctant to admit it.

Not Eliot Spitzer.

In fact one of the worrisome things about his crusade was his zeal. He has that protruding jaw and steely stare through pinched eyes. You just somehow knew his moral arrogance would eventually bring him down.

As one who, in a much lower profile setting, has spent his professional life in the public eye (and gotten stung a couple of times by those who relished a chance to bring me down) I have empathy for Governor Spitzer. He is married and has kids, and what they have to go through is going to be terrible. And all because of him.

I have never had the self-assurance he looked to have. So I was never the juicy target he was. You have to wonder where the disconnect in such a person may be. Did he so compartmentalize his life that he could stand in front of that bank of microphones and TV cameras and tell the world he was going relentlessly after bad guys to make the world a better place, without thinking about his own foibles?

Maybe.

I'm glad he was caught. Not because I care about whether he was a hypocrite or because his reckless sex life might impede or endanger his job as Governor of New York, but because he now has a chance to shed the bullshit that surely kept him from any hope of becoming a person of inner integrity.

Whether he takes the chance remains to be seen.

The race for the Democratic nomination for president has entered a critical moment.

Not only because it is so close and the Party may have to find some way to augment the primary results in order to settle on whether the candidate will be Clinton or Obama.

But maybe even more about the climate this race is going to have in the stretch race. A climate that one presumes will mark the campaign against Senator McCain for the big prize.

Maybe no one has underlined the issue so starkly as Maureen Dowd, the NY Times columnist known for her biting wit and sarcasm.

For years she has savaged both the Clintons for their callous behavior. She has decried Hilary's trying to bear the mantle of feminism as if it were a weapon with which to destroy anyone who stood between her and her ambition. She teased her about her blatant posturing about being as tough as any man. And she - along with many of us - would never let her forget her vote to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, suggesting her vote was more about political positioning and proving that she doesn't shy away from military action just because she us a woman.

Then, after the famous crying moment in New Hampshire (I watch almost no TV so i haven't seen this moment as often as many, but I have seen a video on the internet and it looks way overblown to me, as if she hesitated for a moment after being asked a question - in an unusually kind and caring way for reporters - about how she was faring under all this pressure with no time to sleep or eat. She paused, her voice caught, and then she responded with more candor than normal.) Ms. Dowd began to chide her for using her femininity to manipulate voters and to turn her husband loose as her bad cop as if she needed him to do the nasty work.

Nothing new about her, Dowd crowed. She turns to her big strong man to protect her when the going gets tough.

Now, with Obama's candidacy no longer a mystical certainty but a dogfight, she is questioning whether he is tough enough to stand against the Clinton buzz saw, and the certain Swift Boating that the Republicans have made their trademark over the past decade.

Most seem to believe it was Clinton going on the attack, turning resolutely negative, that ensured her Ohio and Texas victories. I suppose it's asking for too much nuance to wonder what it means that Obama made up nearly 20 points in the weeks leading up to those primaries which were long considered easy wins for her. Since he had been gaining fast - until the final days before the voting, when the tide seemed to turn in her favor - I suppose it is inevitable that the common wisdom would be that whatever she did in those final days (and what she did was attack him) accounted for her good finish. (Although the Texas vote now looks as if it was virtually a tie and he gained the most delegates from that arcane primary.)

What seems to have emerged from all this is that negative campaigning is the way elections are won. So the Super Delegates, who will finally decide the Democratic nominee, are closely watching these final primaries to see how Obama stands up under her fierce attacks, and whether he can mount an effective attack on her.

If he stands tough and tall - so goes this line - and either wins or evenly divides the remaining delegates, the Super Delegates will regard him as strong enough to face the nasty Republican onslaught and make him the nominee.

And after the 2000 election in which Gore decided being a statesman and considering the welfare of the nation over fighting the Supreme Court and the Florida result the high road, and John Kerry stood like a wooden statue while the party of George Bush - who dodged Viet Nam by having his daddy get him into the National Guard - dared to attack his legitimate heroic war record, who can blame the Democrats for wanting a candidate who will not become Bambi in the headlights?

But here's the dilemma for Obama.

He has made positive campaigning the distinctive mark of his candidacy. Turning aside from the partisan wars that have deadlocked the nation and its politics for so long, he says he can appeal to the best rather than to the worst in us, and usher in a new day for which we are all so eager.

And it has made him that rock star you see being mobbed wherever he goes.

But he has to have people around him - not to mention the old pols and the Super Delegates - who are taken with his candidacy but who believe reality requires getting nasty and negative in winning elections.

The next short period is going to tell us a lot about Barack Obama. I have no doubt he has, until now, believed in his own rhetoric. And, as many have pointed out, he could afford to. Because he had a ridiculously easy election to the Senate, and has only been there for half a term.

It's clear that Hilary Clinton will spare nothing and no one in winning the nomination. She has been working toward this for years, and if she falls short, she seems to convey that her life will have ended. She has even broken what some call the only firm rule in a race for the nomination, which is to suggest that only she and McCain are fit to govern, thus giving the Republicans a sweet sound bite for the fall.

When Obama's people plead with him, tell him he has no choice if he is serious about winning, how will he respond? Will he say, Well, you find some people to go out there and carry those spears for me so I don't have to look as if I am turning my back on what I have been saying all along?

Will he say, I am a politician, and the first obligation of a politician is to get elected. Unless you get elected you can't do any of the things you believe in. So, even though I don't believe in it, I will go negative.

Or will he say, You know, I want to win this election. But not only is it not the only thing that matters to me, nor does the future of the country absolutely depend on it. And if I am elected I intend to govern as I have campaigned, by finding common ground and bringing people on opposite sides together. If I go negative now it will mean I will have to govern as every president has for my life. I'm willing to take my chances with going on as I have been.

I guess I've pretty much shown my hand about which I hope he does.

So the battle for those last delegates for the Democratic nomination as a new focus.

One of the names on Obama's masthead, Samantha Power - a Harvard professor who won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide," used a no-no word, monster, in describing Hilary Clinton's determination to win the nomination at any cost.

In what would once have been as scandalous as calling it like she sees it, she made the comment in an informal moment during a book tour in Scotland to promote her newest book about Setgio Viera de Mello, the brilliant and dedicated UN Undersecretary who was killed by a suicide bomber while attempting to find some way for the UN to help untangle our Iraq mess, and - this even appears in the quote from the story - when she used the word monster (it looks as if she might have gotten carried away in the moment) she caught herself and said, "That's off the record."

Who knows what reporters think about these old rules?

Prince Harry was apparently in combat in Afghanistan for several weeks before the story broke and required the British military to remove him from harm's way. In what is now being touted, wide-eyed, as miraculous for the notorious scandal-loving British tabloids, many knew he was there and agreed not to print the story.

For someone like me, who doesn't have to compete and sell newspapers, the decision not to print that story seems not simply the obvious right choice, but a simple no-brainer.

We had read of the possibility of the young grandson of the Queen, heir once removed to the world's longest standing monarchy, going into combat with the troops he has been training with. I normally don't care what happens with the British monarchy, nor pay attention to the tabloids following their sex lives.

But I had hoped they wouldn't send Harry to the front, both for the sake of not providing an irresistible target for militants, and for the sake of his comrades who would be more vulnerable and have the extra task of protecting him.

Initially it looked as if Drudge had broken the story, and that confirmed the rap against Matt Drudge, that he is an irresponsible sensationalist who will print anything he hears in a whisper, without concern for its truth. Then it seemed that a small paper - perhaps in South America? - had already run the story a few weeks earlier and it had been missed by the wire services and blogs, but was about to hit them all.

Once Drudge printed the story Harry had to go home.

And now so does Samantha Power.

I don't think Hilary Clinton is a monster (any more than any of us in pursuit of something we regard as more precious than life itself), and I doubt Samantha Power does either. In fact, since she added that caveat about being off the record, she must have immediately recognized that she had gone over the edge. (In the same interview she is quoted as using the F word, which also makes it sound as if she was pretty relaxed and/or wound up.)

In this case the real monster is the disappearance of any moment in the life of a public figure (or anyone else who may, for that moment, have a newsworthy persona) that could be considered their own, a moment in which they could say something injudicious and merely get a smile of understanding from the press who know their own foibles.

Putting this into perspective, I still believe Clinton's Monica moment ought to have been handled among his own staff and perhaps a couple of leaders of the opposition Party brought in to warn him of the consequences of reckless behavior. Unlike Kennedy's dalliance with a woman who was also a girlfriend of a notorious mobster, Clinton's indiscretion did not put the nation at risk. Until it became public and - so some believe - caused him to ineffectually wag the dog with cruise missiles.

Like the rest of us the press rules and behavior evolve as the culture around us evolves. It may be that the whole notion of privacy in this globally digitalized time is going to be seen as a quaint artifact of a bygone world.

How the hell anyone can survive the scrutiny in national public life is going to be an ever greater haunting question.

I am a semi-recovering political junkie.

Likely the trauma of JFK's assassination, followed five years later by the killing of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, caused me to promise myself I would never again let myself become emotionally entangled with public people.

I grew up and learned that politicians, like all public figures, are human beings with foibles. It is adolescent and unfair to project our unfulfilled fantasies onto those who stand in for us.

Good friends became members of Congress, Bishops, CIA agents, captains of industry financial shakers. And I understood it is an incalculable combination of perseverance, hard work, timing and good luck, rather than some magical gift, that accounts for the handful who rise to the top.

Having thrown in my emotional lot with the Kennedy administration - I can still tell you the names and background of every member of his cabinet and inner circle - I have since become an interested bystander, remaining mostly on the sidelines. Bill Clinton was the only president since for whom I felt personal affection - and still do - but he was hardly the sort of man one might lionize, like another Abraham Lincoln. His embarrassing personal foibles - his inability to keep zipped even when on duty - only confirmed both my affection and sympathy for him, and underlined my sophisticated understanding that only human beings, with clay feet, become president.

But the feelings I carried into bed with me last night - and which caused me to toss from 3:30AM on - signaled me that this Barack Obama has gotten under my skin.

It is surely a good thing, for Senator Obama, for the Democratic Party, for the nation, and for sure for Senator Clinton, that his seemingly mystical ascendency was interrupted yesterday by reality.

But I was hoping for a bodily ascension into the White House.

I know better. The man is 46 years old. He grew up in a household with no father. His biological father was Kenyan, his step-father Indonesian, his mother middle-class white Kansan. He grew up on the streets of Chicago battled his way to a superior education and married a Princeton graduate who, like him, also excelled at Harvard Law School.

He carries the marks of a man who has been banged around by life.

And yet most of what we see is this charmed, charming figure who stands above the fray and promises us a new day.

I am still fiercely for him. Will work, send money and vote for him should he be the Democratic candidate. I will also vote for Hilary Clinton if she is the candidate. But without the emotional charge.

I believe in the man no less than I did 24 hours ago. The thought of him being our nation's face to the world after the past eight years of the smirking Bush, makes my heart skip a beat.

But last night was an important reality check. Not only is there still a long way to go, but if and when he gets there, the world is not going to fall at his feet.

All Beginnings are difficult - Talmudic Saying

Walking through the parking lot of the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club on my way to watch the world’s greatest(and the nation’s oldest) tennis tournament – The Pacific Coast Men’s Doubles – I stopped to admire a teal colored Aston Martin. Even among the expensive Mercedes and occasional Maseratis, its distinctive color and elegance caught my attention.

Later, when I was walking back, two men were circling the car, one of them punching a remote that prompted a satisfying beep from the exotic auto, but when he tried the door, it remained locked. I watched him do this several times before I made what I hoped might be a helpful suggestion.

You know, I said, I once did the same thing with my old Honda Civic. Nearly drove myself nuts until I looked a row over and realized this was another Honda just like mine, but not mine. You might want to make sure this Aston Martin is yours and not one just like it. He smiled weakly.

The tennis tournament pits many of the nation’s top college doubles teams against each other and a few unaffiliated teams. Pepperdine dominated with three teams in the semi-finals. Young, fit athletes competing fiercely but in high good spirits. Makes you hopeful for the future of the country.

Except not one of the eight players in the semis was from the United States. Germany, Russia, Croatia, Australia, Mexico, India, from all over the world.

I read yesterday that the Russians are now paying such high salaries to their professional hockey players so they are no longer migrating to the NHL. Russia expects to soon get stronger than the NHL.

Our son wrote a story for the NY Times a year ago about a tryout camp in Oregon where Chinese basketball scouts came looking for Americans to play in China. Hoping for a medal in the Olympics, the Chinese provided for each of their teams to hire one foreign player who could play half the minutes. The pay was very good and so were the players.

One of the factors vexing our nation in this shaky moment is the difficulty of merging our strengths and weaknesses with the world’s other countries that we no longer dominate. Watching the dollar lose its strength against other currencies, and our financial markets invest abroad to sustain themselves is unfamiliar, unnerving.

You just know that Democratic candidates arguing over who is most strongly against NAFTA, while understandable when you see weeping workers without jobs, hoping to withdraw from the challenges of an internet interconnected world is futile.

A friend sent me a DVD of his son, a Marine Corps Major recently back from Anbar province in Iraq where he commanded troops to regain that province from insurgents. I have known this man since he was a baby. (He once - when he was 6 - skated by me on our pond in Vermont, slipped and, lunging to regain balance, sliced open my eyelid with his hockey stick.)

He is a poster boy for the Marines. Speaking to a group near his family’s home in Maine, he stands tall and proud, describing the bravery of his troops effectively clearing the province of the ‘enemy.’ He stirs awe in you, delight in our young people, confidence entrusting our future to them.

I so wanted to believe his certainty that their quelling of resistance would mean peace over the long haul for that place. And for us.

Everything else in the world, our love of Aston Martins, winning tennis teams, huge markets, hunger for peace, makes me believe gaining them with our superior weapons is no longer – if it ever was – workable.

Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton must be on tenterhooks today, waiting to see what their promise of repairing American self-love, jobs and security has done for their candidacy. Whoever is president this time next year will preside over a tricky new moment.

Three or four years ago a friend introduced me to the work of Dr. John Sarno.

You might want to look him up on the internet. He is the doctor who has evolved a way of approaching physical body pain that is hardly new or unique to him, but he has come close to making it a medical sub-specialty. (Against, as you can imagine, the dead bodies of the vast number of physicians.)

His theory is simple and his method even simpler.

Just about all body pain you experience, lower back, headache, neuritis, neuralgia, is caused by your mind/brain. (I join those two like that because no one still knows just what we mean by mind, but Sarno's method requires use of the term.) So, we're talking psychosomatic medicine, but perhaps not in exactly the way most of us understand that term.

Sarno does not deny that the pain is real. It is not phantom pain. It is real, physical, measurable (insofar as pain can be measured) pain.

He believes that when your mind perceives that something unpleasant is seeping from your unconscious to your conscious awareness, something that your mind perceives as so disturbing that your consciousness will suffer some sort of trauma, your brain chooses some vulnerable spot in your body - among Americans the lower back seems to be most favored, signals your circulatory system to pinch off a little of the normal blood supply, and viola, you've got back pain.

Pain on which your mind focuses rather than on whatever your mind regarded as too traumatic for you to look at.

Now, the really revolutionary piece of Sarno's work is not what I have just written, almost every post-Freudian knows about that, whether they give it a lot of credence or little. What is new is Sarno's insistence that most of us need not get into intensive long-term psychotherapy to address whatever is gnawing at us. For most of us simply acknowledging the mechanism, that our pain is caused, not by a slipped disc or curvature of the spine, but by the diminished blood supply that the brain caused to protect us from emotional turmoil.

What's more, Sarno insists that whatever the mind is wishing to conceal from us need not be some dramatic incident, childhood sexual abuse or near-death experience, but can be anything - or an accumulation of seemingly small insignificant things. It's likely we won't be able to recall most of them.

But the feelings they trigger - rage, shame, hopelessness, fear, failure - are not only well known to all of us, they are inevitable pieces of living in the world. Everyone has them. But many, maybe most, of us regard them as unacceptable signals that we are not living successfully. So, in order to persuade the world - and, more importantly, ourselves - that we are indeed doing well, with the cooperation of our mind, our bodies present us with pain to distract us from that reality.

This is not true for a neurotic few, but for everyone.

And, so Sarno says, all one must do to begin to recover from the pain, is to acknowledge that it is being caused not by muscular-skeletal anomalies, but by the process he describes. He says 90% of the people who have been "cured" by his method have done so merely by reading his book, people neither he nor any other doctor has ever seen.

It all makes eminently good sense. So much good sense that i set out in my journal entry this morning to list the events, relationships, feelings and physical symptoms that might seem to fit Sarno's scheme.

Listing them is going to take at least the rest of the month.