Interview with Jim Wallis

I commend to your attention the BuzzFlash interview with Jim Wallis, a significant contributor to religious discourse in America from a liberal evangelical standpoint. A man of deep faith and articulate, prophetic commentary, he has much to say that we all need to hear. He is currently touring with his new book, God's Politics. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Jim Wallis: Well, having had two debates this week with Jerry Falwell, I want to tell you that he excludes me. Listen – religion doesn't have a monopoly on morality, and that should be clearly stated. What we're finding in this book tour and in my book signings – from Austin, Texas to Dayton, Ohio to wherever we go – the usual reading to 50 people sitting quietly in their seats has grown to be town meetings with 400 people sitting on the floor.

And they're not just large crowds, they're diverse crowds. You've got Evangelicals who don't feel represented by Jerry Falwell. You've got Catholics who feel the bishops – the right-wing bishops who command them to single-issue voting only on abortion, and ignore all the rest of Catholic social teaching – they don't feel spoken for by them. You've got mainline Protestants who feel left out of the whole conversation and always disrespected. You've got black churches who feel like this is always a white conversation about religion. Latinos, Asian Christians, and a lot of Jews are coming out – rabbis and their congregations. A lot of the synagogues are having book studies on the book. And it's full of [Micah] and Amos and Isaiah, and Abraham, Joshua, Hershel, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. And a lot of the Muslims who are looking for a better, more humane, inclusive religion are coming out to this, too, of course.

A lot of folks who are not religious but would call themselves spiritual are interested, and a whole lot of young people – a whole lot of young people who maybe saw me on Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, and they are now saying we didn't know that Christians could care about poverty, the environment, or be against the war in Iraq. They didn't know a progressive religion option even existed.

The BB says, check him out!

Life Work of Christ - Dream Fragment

While prolonging my time snuggled in bed this morning, I kept drifting in and out of sleep, with short mini-dreams. In the last one I stood by a jigsaw puzzle titled “The Life Work of Christ.” Waking, I concluded I have to piece together my own Christology.

Hardly a fresh concept, but my unconscious seems to have signaled that part of my doctoral work is on target.

The BB and the Raven in Yelapa, Mexico 

Hecuba’s Song - Poem

With photos of crows posted today, how can I omit this poem? Don Cuervo, of course, is Sir Crow in Spanish, and this is for the Raven, my dearest friend. The imagery comes from Euripides' The Trojan Women, a powerful play about the aftermath of war.


Hecuba’s Song
For My Soul Mate

Don Cuervo, ever with your tricks,
you shake things up
and create possibility.
Without your mischief
would anything new emerge?
Like Poseidon you shake things up—
even a god who builds towers of stone
may lament groves become desert,
divine things fallen sick,
and forsake his altars—
structure shifts, certainties fail,
relationships rupture.
Who can know tomorrow?
If we did, none would believe.

“Oh, fools, the men who lay a city waste,
giving to desolation temples, tombs,
the sanctuaries of the dead—so soon
to die themselves.”

Upon what willows
might we hang our harps
when Babylon’s rivers
themselves lament?
Exile upon exile,
sorrow upon sorrow,
we have no continuing city.

Do our bones tell us
deep within
that our county is lost?
Triumphant over distant foes,
perhaps,
but lost to its own soul,
its dream,
its honorable hopes.

“All was nothing—nothing, always.”

I am no Cassandra.
Some believe me.
I know nothing.
Not what to expect,
nor what to hope for;
what to dread
or how to prepare.
Yet, I will launch my ship
with no known destination.
We sail we know not where.
“Drift with the stream.”
Oh yes, we drift.

Raven, troubler, do you know?
Have you any idea
where your detours may send us?
What you stir up?
Have I any notion
what I pray for,
or offer my tobacco,
or dance and beat my drum?

At last the vision
I could never draw
seems real:
Raven and Bear dance,
bearing their part
with all creation.
I cannot draw it,
but I see it.

It is good.
Creation continues.
This is no longer Troy.

April 10, 2003

Liquidambars in February 

Crow on the Ground 

Crow on Lamppost 

The BB in Colima, Mexico, a few years ago 

Friday Morning 2/18/2005 

The voice of the turtle

The Song of Songs speaks of the coming of spring:

My beloved speaks and says to me:
"Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
—Song of Solomon 2:10-13

I am fond of the Authorized Version's turn of phrase, "the voice of the turtle," though that was always difficult for me to imagine as a child. Cannot recall ever having heard a turtle making noises, you know what I mean?

Still and all, there have been dove sightings aplenty from my window of late, in spite of the heavier than usual rains from the "pineapple express" that has been blowing through. I saw several this morning, but was not able to get a photo of them. I did get some pics of the crows that hang around the neighborhood and a few of the day in general.

I hope you enjoy them.
The BB

A companion Blog

You may find other writings and art by the BB at our companion blog: BearFeathers.
Check it out.
http://bearfeathers.blogspot.com/

"He Fills All Things With Blessing" 

The BB 

Dust on a Bowl of Rose Leaves - Poem

Emergent glories yet unrecognized, do they startle or confuse?
Xs formless at first, small seeds that blossom in elegant cross-stitch,
Cryptic till we see the hints of pattern—how to decipher or discern?
Eyes trained, dulled, by habit grasp the whorish flower, understand its gaudy
Pigments and display—that reveling in hue, curve, scent, allure—
Teasing, tantalizing, shameless in the cry: I am alive! Behold!

For children untrained, for weathered souls with wandering mind
Or the true gardener, wonder is allowed: to catch at first emergent greens, to
Rest and pay respect at breaking soil, at hints of configuration, before

The secret discloses itself, the plant is known. What clue lies in the
Heart’s unknowing, the futility of the mind’s appetite? Should
Each creature, moment, place explain itself? Would it matter?

Perceiving beyond knowledge—in the bone, the pulse, the breath—
Or simple ignorance: how do they differ? My sureties and
Insecurities both speak of what I wish I knew but don’t really.
Nothing, we acknowledge often, is so well known as the fact
That we know so little of this world, of ourselves, of God.

This being the case, how have I come to think that I can turn
Hints of the moment into knowledge of what must pass,
Ever planning, predicting, adjusting, seeking readiness?

Surprise overtakes me always. There is no certain knowing
This side of the veils, my eye-binding grave clothes,
Illusions wrapping me Lazar-like against the day’s blinding
Light as I struggle free of the enclosing stone. Shall I trust this
Luminous brilliance woven in the fierce voice of my Friend?

Plunged deep in swirling I never set in motion and cannot still,
Overcome, not by saltwater sobs but the great ocean’s womb
In which our life is formed, tossed in cosmic contractions,
Not sensing above, below, behind, before, beside,
Turned constantly about by waters I cannot grasp,

Tasting the wet death of bloody birth, the tearing terror,
Have I the faintest inkling of the way? I am lost in joy.
Earth and Heaven bring me forth, costly delight! Deep
Rightness! The wheel turns as it should, again and again—
Everlasting newness in the repetitions, inexhaustible grace.


What of the searing death, the birth of fire? Swirling tongues
Of flame now leaping, soaring, rising in exultant roar,
Up, up, linking worlds, sucking the air into its consuming ecstasy!
Lungs released from the waters cry for this breath, craving
Draughts of life even as each residue is burnt away.

Bereft of direction, possession, place, and certainty, I strike my feet on
Earth in rhythms only partly mine and mostly not. The drum calls.

Now I look up at batik dancers, total motion and abandon. There is
Only pulse and movement, nothing solid: action not quite frozen in fabric.

Do I have the slightest hint of what emerges now, in this place
And moment, this specific intersection of roads within the sacred hoop?
No sure knowing of my own self (desperately deceitful heart), no
Certainty of what comes to birth in me. And yet I dare trust that
Each moment, action or inaction, is part of God’s pattern,

Ancient and novel realities surpassing terms of our defining,
Now colliding, colluding, combining, creating, expressing life,
Defeating death through its acceptance—cruciform marvel!

The vision, O Christ, you gave me of yourself a year ago—
Halo of red flame amid the waters of baptism—only began to
Emerge with the painting of the ikon. You continue to unfold
Riches of meaning to my too small heart, painting yourself with
Every pain I must endure, each joy, each stroke of faith and hope and love.

I am now the maple boards, hewn and milled and cut,
Sanded smooth and joined by Nazareth’s son, sized with hide

Of rabbit, wrapped in linen (your shroud, surely),
Next closed in seemingly endless layers of gesso, sanded smoother still,
Lined with graving steel, your message and image carved into me,
You having first engraved my name upon your palm.

Then there is the guilt when gilded over with gold, fearing my
Heart cannot deserve such adornment. You reassure, knowing better than I
Each fault and flaw in the material you made and chose.

Does it seem likely that all creation and the creator’s presence
And blessing can appear in me? Your Gospel tells me, Yes!
Not understanding is no barrier to my formation in your image, gracious
Christ, I need but trust you in and above all, yes, and within me.
Even the deaths of earth and water, fire and air, are but birth in you, your birth in me.

July 31, 2002

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

—From T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” stanza II, in Four Quartets

The poem above was written during a turbulent transition period of my life. In addition to being an acrostic of the sentence from Eliot, it references two pieces of art. The primary one is an icon I wrote the previous year, hence the references to the whole process of icon-making. The other is a piece of batik with wonderfully dynamic silhouettes of drummers and dancers.

Imagery of the four primal elements had emerged in a session with my spiritual director in the context of trial and transformation, and I knew that some kind of rebirth was going on in my life as well. This is the densest and most complex poem I have ever written. Thanks for reading through it.
--The BB

Genocide has a face

I was born on the first anniversary of V-E Day, 8 May 1946. As a boy I saw a flag printed on the calendar in our kitchen on my birthday every year, noting Victory in Europe at the end of WWII. Still, in spite of doing extremely well in math classes, I did not calculate that I must have been conceived when Japan surrendered in August 1945. This only dawned on me as folks prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. I am a child of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My consciousness, somehow, has never escaped the horrors what humans are capable of doing to each other.

I was born in Fresno, California, in the heart of the Central Valley—the land of raisins, cotton, safflower, peaches, almonds, table grapes, figs, etc. It was one of the areas that attracted immigrants, including my Swedish grandparents. It was also home to many who had fled the Armenian genocide of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus I grew up in an area where one could hear Armenian spoken, see Armenian newspapers, and rejoice in Armenian food.
Back in the early 30s two newlywed couples lived next door to each other: my parents and the Kooyumjians. George Kooyumjian worked as a butcher and had a deli called Home Market. As a boy he had seen his entire family slaughtered by the Turks. I never heard him speak of this, but the tale was passed through my parents. Over the years I had many Armenian fiends. One taught me to recite the Armenian alphabet although I could not read it, some taught me a few phrases, and all of them fed me. The hospitality practices of the Ancient Near East are not something found only in history books, they are a living reality of which I have been a beneficiary.

The Armenian genocide was acknowledged but not really discussed. For the elders it was too painful a memory, to their children it was too vague. It all became more specific for me when I went to France for a semester abroad in fall of 1967.

As a French major at Pomona College I was expected to spend a semester in France and I was blessed to spend two months in Montpellier and one in Paris. While in Montpellier I lived with L’Intendant Général Jean F Urvoy and his family. He was in charge of L’École Militaire d’Administration, the French army’s business school. (It has gone through some changes and is now known as École militaire supérieure d’administration et de management, 4, rue du 81e Régiment d’Infanterie, 34056 MONTPELLIER Cedex 1.) When the General traveled to review troops or attend some other army dog and pony show, I got to travel along with him and M Bros, the chauffeur. (Mme Bros was the cook for the General’s household.) It was thus that I got to visit Marseilles for a day.

My friend Connie Kemalyan, who had studied for a year at Aix-en-Provence, said that if I were ever in Marseilles I had to meet a friend of hers, so I went to meet this Armenian family in southern France. Connie’s friend was not home and the only one who could really visit with me was her father, who took me to his furniture store on the main street downtown. It was quite an adventure. I learned about the styles and periods of French furniture and how to distinguish them, all in French, of course. (To this day when I want to identify acajou flambé I can only do it in French.)

The large and splendid furniture store was named Massis, Armenian for Ararat, the mountain in Eastern Turkey that symbolizes homeland to Armenians. At one point in the afternoon, this passionate elder had a serious talk with me. He gave me a small booklet about the Armenian genocide and told me that it was up to my generation to make sure the story was told and not forgotten. I felt that an elder had given me a solemn charge which I have never since forgotten. I took the booklet and read it. Over the years I have read more of the stories the survivors found so painful that their children often had to uncover them by digging into the family past. Cities woven into the narrative are woven in my memory, for my friends’ families had told of their parents and grandparents coming from Van and Dyarbekir. Genocide had names and faces, faces similar to the ones in family portraits in the homes of my friends, wedding pictures of grandparents resembling photos in history books recounting tales of atrocities.

Such was my first personal link to the theme of genocide in the 20th century, but not the last. I had Jewish friends in school also, but we did not talk much of the Holocaust. Perhaps it was too fresh when I was a boy, something that happened just before I was born. My WWII focus was on the Pacific theater and the many episodes of “Victory at Sea” that my friends and I watched before going outside to play war games, armed with nothing but our imaginations. As a curmudgeonly aside, I must remark that we made much more realistic sounds of firing weapons and explosions than those I hear children make nowadays. We would never simply say, “Bang, bang.”

When taking political science in college I wrote a short paper comparing the British Parliament and the Israeli Knesset, which involved deepening my awareness of the Zionist movement and the establishment of the state of Israel. This was before the 1967 Six-Day War in which “Israel gained control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.”(Wikipedia) The reality of the Holocaust entered my soul later, when I was living in the Fairfax and West Hollywood, neighborhoods of Los Angeles where emigrant Jews gathered before adjusting to American society. Here you had the spirit of an Eastern European stetl in a California metropolis. I could take a walk and hear half a dozen languages spoken, including Yiddish and modern Hebrew. A challenge I posed for myself was trying to read the headlines on the Forward, a Yiddish publication in the United States founded in 1897. Since Yiddish is a form of High German written with the Hebrew alphabet, the challenge was a form of decoding or puzzle-solving, exercises I have always enjoyed. An illustration would be reformulating the Hebrew characters in to something recognizable as “editorial.” Next to the polyglot newsstand would be yet another falafel stand where one could get a fresh taste of the Middle East.
The shadow of this wonderfully colorful neighborhood was the reason why all these Jews had some here, fleeing the Holocaust decades ago or still fleeing oppression in the late 1970s. Sacrificing their minimal status the familiarity of their homeland, they left all that was familiar to go to a place they had never been, modern Abrams and Sarais who would soon be given new names and new beginnings. As I became acquainted with my neighbors, I began to realize how difficult and dangerous such a journey is, and how the promise often exceeds the harsh reality of the new life.

Pauline Goret was born in St Petersburg under the Czar at the end of the 19th century. She married a Polish engineer and they had two daughters. Her husband and one daughter perished under the Nazis. Pauline and Elizabeth escaped through France to the United States. They lived in the apartment adjoining ours. Bill and I just called her “Mama.” Mrs. Goret seemed too distant and Pauline was out of the question. Her English was minimal, but we communicated a fondness that was very real. Elizabeth was haunted by night terrors. We would be awakened in the middle of the night by her voice coming through the thin wall where our closets abutted or through windows kept open in the summer, as we did not have air conditioning. All she said were two words, alternating with long pauses in between. “Sh*t!” “God damn!” She could go on for an hour or so. I have no idea what horrors she may have seen, what memories or anxieties visited her in the dark. We never talked about it.

One day at the Thrifty drug store on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue I noticed that the sleeve of the lady at the counter shifted up her arm. I saw the numbers tattooed there and knew what they meant. It was not the only time I saw such marks, mute testimony to survival in the concentration camps. One did not discuss such things, but one never forgets.

Various threads came together in late April of 1994, when I was serving as interim priest at St Aidan’s in San Francisco and working on a sermon. The Eastertide text from Acts was to include Peter’s bold affirmation: “We are witnesses of these things.” Peter was speaking of the entire Paschal Mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus. In order for us all to pass into resurrection and proclaim it, I felt we needed to witness as well to death, so we could be whole, speaking the truth we know.

The AIDS epidemic had been sweeping through San Francisco and taken a heavy toll on St Aidan’s, all of which was compounded by the typical grave illnesses, accidents, and mortality of life. The congregation had loved much and suffered much loss and grief. They were witnesses. April 24 is Armenian Martyrs’ Day, something I knew from growing up with Armenian friends in Fresno, and it fell on that Sunday. Some friends and I had seen the movie Schindler’s List that week and I knew that Yom Hashoa, or Holocaust Day, had just passed. Curious about whether it was a fixed day on the Western calendar or was governed by the lunar Jewish calendar, I called our neighbors in El Cerrito, the Blumenfelds. Joel and Rochelle seemed especially interested in my reactions to Schindler’s List, then told me they knew the author of the book. This intrigued me, but the next revelation floored me. Rochelle’s father was one of “Schindler’s Jews.” Oskar Schindler had saved his life, and my neighbor and her two adorable children, Jonah and Miriam, walked the earth because of one “righteous gentile.” Genocide had more human faces.

When I came to St Cuthbert’s, Oakland, in 1995, there were more survivors of genocide to meet. These were members of several families, chiefly the extended Peou family, who had some from Cambodia by way of refugee camps in Thailand and Vietnam. They had escaped from the Khmer Rouge and its brutal reign under the Maoist agrarian ideology of Pol Pot. Heng Peou, the patriarch of the clan, had ties to the Cambodian royal family and served in the military, as had his brother. His brother insisted on keeping his uniform and was consequently killed by the Khmer Rouge; Heng had urged him to get rid of it for his own safety. The family had been scattered and then reunited. That so many members escaped to the United States is amazing. Sarom Khak and her husband Seout (Stewart) Peou had fled, she on the verge of giving birth and he carrying one-year-old Sophoak. Sophoan was born as they journeyed through the mountains toward Thailand. Members of the family have shared tales of overcoming terror of leeches to become the fastest rice planter in the cadre, of eating rats and insects to survive starvation, of serving the Khmer Rouge by day and stealing food by night, of having to decide who in the family gets to eat. These were educated people who had been made into slaves of the peasants, living every day in mortal terror that they might be next to join the corpses in the Killing Fields. They could not let it be known that they had been to college or spoke anything but Khmer, no hint of serving the government could be uttered. Heng Peou was on a death list, but the Khmer Rouge did not know what he looked like, an oversight that probably saved his life. These were members of our congregation. Genocide had more faces.

A few years back Sudan started showing up in press releases from the Anglican Communion News Service. The Church there was reporting tales of atrocities, of kidnapping and slavery, of rape and murder. The victims were southern Sudanese, mostly Christians or followers of indigenous African faiths. I began praying for Sudan. Much later the press began to talk of genocide in the south and west of Sudan until it became a global scandal. Only recently the government has reached an agreement with the south to restrain the janjaweed rebels who have been perpetrating the atrocities (allegedly with government aid and certainly with government knowledge and failure to prevent such acts). We had seen such horrors in the ethnic wars of Rwanda a decade ago (while the world watched ineffectively). The Bosnian conflict demonstrated the power of a radical few to stir up hatred among Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croatians, and Muslim Bosnians who had lived together in peace for centuries. We keep reenacting the story of Cain and Abel.

We recently saw commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz sixty years ago. People gathered, heads of state and survivors, to remember. Owning up to the harsh side of the truth is not easy or pleasant, but it is necessary. Speaking the truth of our own experience is vital. Joining with the Apostle Peter to say to all, “We are witnesses to these things,” remains an ongoing obligation if we are to avoid collective and individual amnesia, the kind of amnesia that forces us to learn everything again the hard way. Learning the hard way it too high a price to pay if it is only because we were too lazy or too cowardly to remember and speak.

Genocide is not about numbers. It is about faces. And names. And human lives, each one unique and unrepeatable.

During my brief two years of graduate study at UCLA I lived in Mira Hershey Hall, the graduate dorm near the botanical garden and the med school. I worked on the front desk staff and one of my colleagues was Justin McCarthy, a great bear of an Irishman studying the Ottoman Empire. He insisted that there was no Armenian genocide; the tales of it are exaggerated or misleading. Action was taken against Armenian activists working against the Turkish government, not the whole race. He still proclaims this and is a big Ottoman scholar these days (I found his book and lectures on the internet). I disagreed with him then and I disagree now.

I can only tell my story, and my story is woven with the stories of the people I have known, the faces I have seen, the voices I have heard, the people I have loved.

We are witnesses of these things.

The Indifference of Creation

What notice does a mountain take of plants and animals when the earth folds and it rises toward the sky? Does the cloud notice its reflection in the lake below? Does the fruit tree think to nourish us in its reproductive cycle? When grasses spring up, have they any care for providing us a soft and refreshing surface on which to walk?

I continue pondering creation, noting its glory and—from our perspective—indifference.
Since I believe in the consciousness of all matter, in varying forms appropriate to the level of complexity and organization involved, I would be inconsistent to deny that a rock has awareness. Geologic time is on a very different scale from human time, so a rock may—speaking by analogy and metaphor—take notice of changes on the grand scale of millions of years, while I notice changes in earth’s seasons, days, and the human construct of seconds. To me, much happens in a day; to a boulder, precious little.

And yet, the exquisite tuning

Last year I read a book by the Royal Astronomer, Sir Martin Rees: Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Rees discusses the sensitivity of the universe to six numbers. Were they slightly different, there would be no stars and no life. They are:

• N = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. “This number measures the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them. If N had a few less zeros, only a short-lived miniature universe could exist: no creatures could grow larger than insect, and there would be no time for biological evolution.”
  
• ε = 0.007. This number “defines how firmly electronic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If ε were o.006 or 0.008, we could not exist.”
  
• “The cosmic number Ω (omega) measures the amount of material in our universe—galaxies, diffuse gas, and ‘dark matter’. Ω tells us the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the universe. If this ratio were too high relative to a particular ‘critical’ value, the universe would have collapsed long ago; had it been too low, no galaxies or stars would have formed. The initial expansion speed seems to have been finely tuned.”
  
• λ “An unsuspected new force—a cosmic ‘antigravity’—controls the expansion of the universe, even though it has no discernible effect on scales less than a billion light-years. It is destined to become ever more dominant over gravity and other forces as our universe becomes ever darker and emptier. fortunately for us (and very surprisingly for theorists), λ is very small. Otherwise its effect would have stopped galaxies from forming….”
  
• “The fabric of our universe depends on one number, Q, which represents the ratio of two fundamental energies and is about 1/100,000 in value. If Q were even smaller, the universe would be inert and structureless; if Q were much larger, it would be a violent place, in which no stars or solar systems could survive, dominated by vast black holes.”
  
• D = the number of spatial dimensions in our world (three). “Life couldn’t exist if D were two or four. Time is a fourth dimension, but distinctively different from the others….”
• 
  —From pages 2 and 3

The physical laws of creation may be supremely indifferent to human existence but they are finely tuned to allow not only for the glorious universe we participate in but also for the emergence of conscious, and even self-conscious, life. Some would argue that this demonstrates (“prove” is too strong a term) conscious design, a charming euphemism for “God or the equivalent thereof.” It may equally suggest that from a limitless number of big bangs, one, at least, turned out this way and we behold the results.

When Rees considers the meaning of the fine tuning of the universe, he is convinced by neither simple acceptance as the way things are (we cannot help but wonder why) nor by concluding that there must be a beneficent Creator. He is more attracted to the idea that there are multiple universes and this is how ours turned out. Others may have developed differently.
At this point, of course, we have entered the realm of faith, decisions about what cannot at this point be proved or disproved. In this essay, however, my focus is not on the question of faith in this sense. Rather it is considering the way things are.

The existence of this specific universe, the one we know and are part of, involves these numbers acting on cosmic scales in ways that boggle the mind (my mind, certainly). These numbers are part of the structure of reality.

If there is a Creator—as I believe there is, though it be unprovable—then the Creator, who establishes the laws of physics and the ratios which structure creation, is not likely to play with these laws and ratios, making exceptions to them or changing the numbers in specific instances for one purpose or another. Not likely unless one believes in a capricious deity, which I do not.
Without some structure all would be chaos. Without some randomness there would be no change, no growth and development, no evolution, no life. With change—specifically genetic mutation—life can evolve, and cancer can also happen. Not all changes are happy ones, not all experiments are successful. There are dead ends and disasters as well as breakthroughs. A world where cancer cannot happen is also a world where life cannot happen. A world without tsunamis is a world where the earth cannot deal with its internal pressures (or a world without water).

When the indifferent forces of creation cause loss to us, we suffer. To us it is disaster, loss, sorrow. We cannot deny this, nor would I. To me, one of the great failures of our society is the inability to express sorrow and grief and the social opprobrium given to those who do express them.

Suffering, disaster, loss, sorrow—all of these, but let us not be hasty to call the natural event evil. It simply is, in a realm where our moral judgments do not apply. They are the nature of creation, a creation that allows all the wonder of diversity and the flourishing of so many kinds of life, of beauty, and even the wonder of consciousness. Natural events are not punishments, nor is escaping them a sign of divine favor. It just is.

Next: considering Auschwitz.

Tsunamis and morality

Thiswas written on the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, January 25.

The Apostle Paul is clearly one of the Bible’s cantankerous characters, not always likable. His writings abound with jewels of grace-filled breakthroughs and with what, from today’s perspective, might be likened to an occasional turd in the punchbowl. What are we to do with him?

Dave Wallace, my professor of Biblical theology some decades ago, offered a helpful explanation regarding Paul. He suggested that Paul’s basic nature did not change on the Damascus Road. What changed was his perspective. He now saw what theologians sometimes call the Jesus event as having a very different meaning than the one he gave it before his conversion. The basic facts were not different. Jesus lived, taught, and died. Paul persecuted the followers of Jesus. But now Paul saw the life of Jesus as a saving event, not the acts of a misguided false messiah, and his own persecuting actions as an act against the Body of Christ, not the due punishment of heretics. Paul was still the irascible Saul of Tarsus, not a whit less thorny and brilliant than he had been before, but a new perspective led him to turn his gifts and flaws in a new direction.

Perspective plays such a pivotal role in our lives. How many times do we look back on our past and see what we did not see before? What changes we experience when we understand in a new way!

My own perspective on many things has changed over the years, and since I know I do not possess the fullness of truth and understanding, I trust it will keep on changing as experience and information lead me to broader and deeper understanding.

In this, and probably the next, issue I wish to look at the universe and, specifically, the earth. What sort of world do we live in? How do I understand it at this point in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey?

This is a timely and urgent issue. Following the tsunami that has devastated so much of coastal Asia, people are raising the usual question: Why did this happen?

Onto this basic question we tend to overlay other questions: Why did God let this happen? If God is good, how can this happen? Is this some kind of punishment?

These questions are not raised only within the Christian tradition. Muslims and Hindus have weighed in on these issues with varying opinions, often declaring a righteous divine judgment on this or that human misbehaving.

It is interesting step back for some historical perspective. For this I am indebted to an online article by Jesse Sunenblick titled “Amoral Earth: Tsunamis in the best of all possible worlds,” found at the following url: http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_001437.php
Sunenblick’s article begins thus:

On Christmas night I opened gifts beside a friend who received Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa, the story of the 1883 earthquake that killed 40,000 people in what is now Indonesia. The next day a tsunami that would prove to be even more devastating struck the same region of the world. It's instinctive, as The New York Times wrote in an editorial a day later, as the death toll began its steady climb, for humans to search for the meaning of an event like this, but what kind of reasonable answer can be found? The Times, for its part, began its coverage with this editorial, a straightforward account of the disaster which in its fifth and final paragraph took a sudden turn:"…except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth's surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them."

The same article looks further back to the earthquake that shook Voltaire out of his Enlightenment optimism, we hear of the Lisbon earthquake.

Also in The Guardian, theologian Martin Kettle rather bluntly contextualized the challenge that the tsunami poses to religion. "There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen?" To answer this, Kettle applies a historical antecedent that might serve us well to consider: the 1755 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Lisbon, Portugal, that killed 90,000 people, led to the expulsion of the Jesuits (some of whom combed the city in the days following the disaster, hanging those whom they thought had incurred God’s wrath) and the secularization of the entire country, shook Voltaire’s optimism to the point that he took up his pen and wrote Candide, and, depending to who you talk to, either cemented the fate of reason over religious faith, or provided the ultimate test for religious faith. That event "shook the modern world…" notes the Lutheran minister and professor Martin Marty, in a recent article in The Washington Post, changing people’s perception of a benevolent god.Voltaire, for his part, trudged about in a depressive fugue, no longer certain that everything, as the earliest principles of optimism or theodicy declared, was for the best. The Age of Reason was drawing to a close. At one point towards the end of Candide, our beleaguered traveler says, "Optimism is a mania for maintaining that things are going well when things are going badly." That idea translates well today on the battlefield of Iraq, perhaps with overtones of Machiavellianism. With respect to natural disasters like the recent tsunami, however, we are not even falsely optimistic; we are unfeeling. As the "overpowering mechanics" of the earth are amoral, without right or wrong, we employ the word "natural" to dispense with guilt as well. All is not for the best, but neither is it for the worse. There is simply no blame to be placed, and this protects us.

I was introduced to the story of the Lisbon earthquake (the word tsunami had not arrived in the West yet) as a French major at Pomona College, reading Voltaire’s Candide. Many now know the story as a musical by Leonard Bernstein, with elements of outrageous farce and wonderful music easing us through the terrors described in the tale.

So, returning to the earthquake and tsunami of last month: How did this happen?

The factual answer may not respond to our natural anguish, but I wish we could adhere to it. The tectonic plates of the earth did what they do: they shifted. The very structure of the earth’s surface with our varied continents is a result of such shifts, and the shifting will continue for the shell of the earth floats on molten rock. It is the nature of the planet we inhabit. When that happens, it can create what we used to call a tidal wave, though they are not really tidal at all. They are vast inrushing waves resulting from the shift of the earth. Coastal areas experience their overpowering force. That is how it happened and why that sort of thing happens.

To expect that such events would not happen or that humans who live near shorelines would never experience the effects of such events is to wish the world were other than it is.
To expect that God sometimes sets aside the laws of physics and sometimes does not is to wish that God did not play by the rules, a questionable desire. It also assumes that the same freedom we pride ourselves on—how fiercely we defend free will in humans—is to be denied the rest of creation. If God allows us to acts as the creatures we are, would God not also allow the rest of creation to act as the creatures they are, the planet itself included? We think it undesirable that God should override human free will, though we often wish for exception in our favor. Should we consider it desirable that God override the nature of Nature? Would that not make for a very arbitrary world? Our tradition teaches us that God sends both rain and sunshine to the just and the unjust, without partiality. Yet we rail against this arrangement whenever floods or droughts come. Our railing and questioning will not change the way things are.

This does not deny the element of suffering and anguish involved. The loss of life, of homes, of loved ones, and the consequential effects of disease and hunger and exposure—all these are immense and overwhelming. We mourn in every stage, including denial, anger, and bargaining. Hence our collective questioning of our understandings of God. The important moral question, however, is how shall we respond?

There is no crisis

Let there be no misunderstanding: there is no crisis in social security. Do not be misled by the White House.

http://www.thereisnocrisis.com/

The BB

There is no crisis

Lest anyone reading here miss the point: there is no crisis in social security. Fine tuning may be required, but there is no need for hasty action at this time, much less a program that would weaken it. Do not be misled by the White House.
http://www.thereisnocrisis.com/

The BB

From my occasional newsletter

Volume One, Number One
January 2005
el Alisal — memos from Hercules, California 94547
[Photos not included here, alas.]
Welcome to the premiere issue of el Alisal, your very own collector’s edition copy of a portal to worlds that may exist only in the furry brain of the editor. Although the sound of the duduk (an apricot-wood wind instrument) floats through the air, this is not a Middle Eastern publication. It comes to you from the powder keg town of Hercules, California, where a dynamite factory once existed, yet life here is rather quiet nowadays. We hereby express our appreciation to His Orthodox Majesty Maximiliano Cuauhtémoc Juárez Primo, Emperor of El Cerrito and Archduke of Hercules, for his gracious license to publish.

It doesn’t get less weird.

Once upon a time, 2002 to be exact, there were beautiful alder trees in this neighborhood, four of them in front of Bearfeathers Press. Though they were cut down, their spirit remains and they gift this rag with the Spanish name for an alder grove: alisal.

Come, take shelter beneath the spirit of these sacred trees, Gentle Reader, let the sinuous rhythms of the duduk soothe your weary soul. Perhaps a cup of tea, a little chat, and a few moments of ease.

Our Sense of Place, Our Place of Rest

As we sit for a while and acknowledge the rootedness and transience of trees, a sense of place comes to consciousness. Our Native American cousins always begin with a recognition of relatedness, of place and of ties with All Our Relations, human and other. The cardinal directions are saluted, Mother Earth upon whom we walk and the Sun from which our energy comes are honored, and the Creator is thanked. The circle of all things, the Sacred Hoop of which Nicholas Black Elk spoke, is renewed.

Considering place from a different perspective for a moment, we may look at Psalm 139:7, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” Though our location may change, the One beyond all names is there with us. In a similar vein, practitioners of Hindu or Buddhist meditation might remind us, “Wherever you go, there you are.” An article in the San Francisco Chronicle told of a yoga class in which the instructor asks, “What time is it?” and all the students reply, “Now!”

We do not need to look at a clock to know what time it is. It is always the only time we have, Now. Nor do we need a map to tell where we are. We are always Here. We have no other time and place than here and now. We carry with us memories of previous times and places, but that is not where we are. We often burden ourselves with anxieties about future times and future places, events that might take place but have not, but that is not where we live either. Trying to live in the past or the future are both illusions, and they can ensnare us and cheat us of the only place and time we actually have in which to be and to act—Here and Now.

The First Nations have an additional understanding of the Sacred Circle in which we are gathered. The two roads that run from north to south and west to east cross in the middle and that center of the Medicine Wheel is where we find ourselves. We are always in the center of the Circle, no matter what our geographic location. This is mystical topography, of course, so we must let go of our Cartesian coordinates for a while to understand. You and I may be thousands of miles apart, yet each of us is in the center of the Sacred Circle, at that crossing point, always in the Here and Now. There is no place we can go and not be with ourselves. There is no place we may flee and not find God already present with us. There is no place but the one place. That is where we are.

As I have encountered these various visions of place over the years, I am struck by how they resonate with my own theology, a theology of imagery and poetry (as my theology has always been). My central image of God is not the bearded old man I associate with Victorian religious art, though it goes back many centuries, but rather of a dynamic, ever-unfolding radiance, the Uncreated Light always shining, giving light and warmth and life. (The Greek words for light and life, phōs & zōē, are often combined in a crossword cross.)

For me, the variant on this radiant Light that speaks of God in relationship to us is the Sacred Heart. Here we see the heart of Jesus, on fire with the love of God, surrounded by the crown of thorns to show God’s passion for us, usually pierced, and radiating light. Light and Life are united by Love.

Since there is no place that God is not, I have wondered where creation occurs. (Remember, my Rational Readers, that this is poetry, not philosophy.) How might there be any room for the Other when the fullness of God fills all? My answer is that a space was created within God, possibly that gap where the Heart is broken by love before all time, a gap manifested in time by the piercing of the lance on Golgotha. “The Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” is the image of God’s great love for creation transcending the category of time and the death of Jesus on the Cross is a concrete manifestation and fulfillment of that love within time.
Dame Julian of Norwich (d. c. 1417), speaks in one of her “shewings” or visions of how “our good Lord looked into his side, and he gazed with joy, and with his sweet regard he drew his creature’s understanding into his side by the same wound; and there he revealed a fair and delectable place, large enough for all mankind [sic] that will be saved and will rest in peace and in love.”

I have thus visualized all of creation, time, and history as taking place within the Heart of God, which might be another view of the eternal Here and Now. Though we live in time and space, our deepest reality abides in a place not defined by space or time.

So, though I began by inviting my Gentle Readers to rest a while with me in the shadow of the sheltering alder tree, these musings suggest that our resting place is much deeper and more abiding than any temporary shade. For me it has meant learning that the tree I loved continues to exist in me, and I must be my own alder, my own sacred tree. Our resting place is everywhere and it is within us. There we find our true self, there we find God, for God dwells in us and we in God.

May 2005 be a time of refreshment and renewal for all who read these pages. May we all learn anew to find refuge within, in all circumstances, no matter what the external hour or location. May we learn to cherish the moment, the breath by which we live each second, the realities around us, the options and opportunities that are ours. May we be free from burdens of guilt and regret over the past, without dodging the truth of who we have been and done. May our thoughts of tomorrow not blind us to now, nor anxieties mislead us. May we live into the future from the freedom of the present.