WATER - A Prayer

Karla shared this prayer at the end of August.  It is offered in this blog with her permission.

~Water~         Karla W

Creator God
Mother and Father of all that is
 
in humbleness and humility for all that is undeserving,
hear our fervent prayer.

We have grown thirsty from crying,
wandering the desert, troubled, delirious...far gone.
We see the water, yet do not drink.

Unclench our sticky, furled fists of greed so we may catch
one lone tear from your heavenly Grace.

Let it wash us clean so that we may, once again, feel the beauty of the earth...like children

eyes cleansed, restoring vision that clearly sees the gift of creation

let it run through our veins, blood of Christ...life giving forgiveness

quenching our insatiable thirst for the riches of the land and sea

give drink to our parched hearts, restoring the connected rhythm with all of creation.

Amen

- submitted by Gareth

Social inequity vs. the environment is a false choice

It's time we stop pretending that inequality and environmental decline are two separate problems 

From Salon.com, March 16, 2014
By Annie Leonard, originally published in Earth Island Journal


Note:  Annie Leonard is an American proponent of sustainability and critic of excessive consumerism. She is most known for her animated film The Story of Stuff about the life-cycle of material goods.

Note 2:  Leonard makes reference to Wilkinson and Pickett.  If you  haven't seen the 17 minute TED talk by Richard Wilkinson called:  "How economic inequality harms societies", I highly recommend it.  You can find it by clicking here.

In this article, Leonard proposes solutions to the challenges of addressing both economic inequality and environmental decline.  While it is a U.S.-based article, it has application to us in Canada as well.

Image Source:  Treehugger.com

Excerpts from the article:

Excerpt 1:  On the one hand, inequality is a huge problem, with many people prevented from accessing the resources they need for dignified lives. Inequality is inherently unjust, and is the root of an array of environmental, health, and social ills. In Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, public health scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that high levels of inequality correlate with a stunning array of ills that reduce quality of life for all of society. 

Excerpt 2:  On the other hand, it’s undeniable that worldwide we’re using too many resources. We have only one planet, but globally humanity is using raw materials and generating waste at a rate that would take 1.5 Earths to sustain.

Excerpt 3:  I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do have some ideas of steps to get started.

Click here to read the entire article, including her ideas for "getting started".

- Submitted by Gareth

 

Doing it the Hard Way

Gamaliel's Ana Garcia-Ashley is the first woman of color to lead a American national community organizing network, faith-based or otherwise. And she's pulling no punches.

From Sojourners Magazine, May 2012

“Question people who have authority, because they tend not to use it well unless you stay on top of them.”

That’s what Ana Garcia-Ashley learned from her grandmother, a seamstress and a teacher in the campo of the Dominican Republic. She was a woman who taught by example, challenging anybody in her small village who misused power. “She would not tolerate anything,” remembers Ana. “She took on whomever—even priests.”

And you can say the same about Ana.

Throughout more than 30 years of community organizing, Ana has put her Catholic faith into action by holding people in power accountable: standing in protest at state capitols, stopping predatory lenders, and blocking deportation trucks by laying her body in the road. “To me there is only one way to be a Catholic,” she says, “and that is out in the public arena, doing something.”

In 2011, Ana became the executive director of Gamaliel, a national network for faith-based community organizing. As “congregational” or faith-based organizers, Gamaliel emphasizes systemic change: engaging congregations in the work of feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and sheltering the homeless, but also in the work of transforming the oppressive systems that leave so many people without food, health insurance, or homes in the first place.

You can read the whole article by clicking here.

- Submitted by Gareth

Turning to One Another

By Margaret Wheatley

 

There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

Ask: “What’s possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking.

Notice what you care about. Assume that many others share your dreams.

Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.

Talk to people you know. Talk to people you don’t know. Talk to people you never talk to.

Be intrigued by the differences you hear. Expect to be surprised. Treasure curiosity more than certainty.

Invite in everybody who cares to work on what’s possible.

Acknowledge that everyone is an expert about something.

Know that creative solutions come from new connections.

Remember, you don’t fear people whose story you know.

Real listening always brings people closer together.

Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world.

Rely on human goodness.  Stay together.

- Read at most recent Just Living meeting

The sober side of Rob Ford

This is an excerpt of the second article to be discussed at the January 28 Just Living meeting.  Please read the entire article by clicking here.

The debacle involving Toronto's mayor was a reminder that democracy begins, not ends, with elections

By David Wilson (Editor, publisher of Observer)

Late last spring, I ventured to a community council meeting in west-end Toronto to defend a healthy 150-year-old oak tree that a homeowner on our street wanted to cut down. Evidently, my one-minute deputation rubbed the brother of Mayor Rob Ford the wrong way.

Councillor Doug Ford ripped into me non-stop for five minutes, accusing me of being behind an online petition (I wasn’t, but so what if I was?) and not respecting the rights of property owners (in whose ranks I count myself). What Ford actually said came through as a venomous blur, but it amounted to this: “You and everyone like you are going down after the next election.” I’m not sure what shook me more — the tirade or the applause it prompted from the public gallery. Another councillor later assured me this was politics as usual in the heart of Ford Nation.

The incident was never far from mind during the Rob Ford train wreck at Toronto City Hall last fall. I laughed along with everyone else as the American late-night TV hosts lampooned the mayor and his jaw-dropping antics. But my laughter was half-hearted, tempered by the sobering realities the spectacle revealed.

One of those realities is the cheapening of forgiveness. As Rev. Christopher Levan points out in an essay this month ("A sorry spectacle"), Rob Ford seemed to think that the more he apologized, the more he was entitled to instant absolution. The fact that his core support seemed prepared to grant him exactly that suggested either a slackening of civic morality or social divisions so deep and raw that sins don’t matter as long as they’re committed by the right guy.

I think the episode also shone a light on the fragility of electoral democracy. The Fords championed the sanctity of elections, yet revealed a breathtaking disregard for the integrity of elected office. ...

- Recommended by Christine

A Sorry Spectacle

During our Just Living meeting this past Sunday, Christine drew our attention to two articles in the January issue of the United Church Observer.   We agreed that we would read the two articles before our next meeting on Tuesday, January 28, with the intention that we will discuss them at that time.

Here is an excerpt of one of the articles.  Please read the entire article by clicking here.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford asked us to forgive and forget. Regrettably, forgiveness doesn’t come that easily. 

Photo source:  Toronto Sun/QMI Agency

By Christopher Levan

...   The whole world watched as the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, unravelled in public. It was a pitiful and painful sight: the tongue-tied mayor confessing that he had lied to the city (and to himself) and that he betrayed the public trust. On a personal level, I felt some compassion for the man. Who hasn’t been caught in a lie? Who hasn’t been humiliated at some point? We can get inside shame like Ford’s and feel his helplessness.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let emotional sympathy fog up our ethical reasoning. In office, the mayor has been a vicious political operator. If you disagreed with him, he dismissed you as part of a conspiracy of left-wing fanatics. He might even seek revenge, as a councillor who didn’t vote with him on a transit issue discovered when Ford initiated a robocall campaign to systematically ridicule him. The mayor used his weekly radio show to malign his enemies, especially the “maggot” journalists who, it turned out, had been telling the truth about him all along. And he was not just a little hypocritical. When a city employee was caught resting his head on his desk, Ford publicly called for his summary dismissal — this from a mayor whose own work habits were questionable, to say the least. Outwardly, he portrayed himself as a tough-on-crime common man, and privately he hung out with shady characters well known to the police. ...

- recommended by Christine

The park bench: Your front-row view of life’s passing parade

Note: After reading the Toronto Star article on the sculpture of the homeless Jesus on a bench (see previous post), and  the controversy it generated, I found this Globe and Mail column to be a fitting companion piece.  Can we find Jesus incarnated there, not only in the homeless person sleeping on a bench, but in all those with whom we share space on these universally accessible places of rest and reflection?  - submitted by Gareth

Immortalized in everything from film to sculpture, the humble public perch (even under a blanket of snow) is a powerful civic tool - part item of furniture, part gentle reminder that, in the democratic realm, everyone gets a seat.

by Sarah Hampson, Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 7, 2013

Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) with Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton) in "Manhattan", a United Artists release. The two are silhouetted in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge in New York as they chat on a Sutton Place bench.
(United Artists)

It is where conversations can happen (or not), an invitation to stillness in a fast world, a place for romance and a promise of inclusion.

Had you not thought very much about the bench as public furniture? I hadn’t either until recently, when, on a visit to the park, I suddenly realized that I was in the living room of a grand palace, with grass as carpet, banks of trees as walls and the sky as ceiling. And there were all these people, a diverse crowd, sitting in the huge reception room on benches. There we all were, thrown together, part of a revolving mix of solitary participants at a gathering we didn’t know we had been invited to.

And then I thought – because thinking, after all, is what you do a fair amount of on a public bench – about how this piece of furniture functions as a powerful metaphor and civic tool. In this, the season of holiday conviviality, the bench – even if under a thick blanket of snow – is perhaps a gentle reminder that the world can and should be a generous and democratic place, where everyone has a place to sit and witness life’s passing parade.

You can read the entire column by CLICKING HERE.

Wake up to the aboriginal comeback

John Ralston Saul - Source:  Globe and Mail

These excerpts are from the Globe and Mail, August 9, 2013, written by John Ralston Saul.  You can read the whole article here.

When Canadians learn that malnourished aboriginal children were used for nutritional experiments, they cannot really be surprised. Shock is a more plausible reaction. We should never be beyond shock. But not surprised. That would be to feign innocence, when we all know that for more than a century, Canadian authorities of all sorts continually acted badly 
when it came to indigenous peoples. Many Canadians knew this when it was happening. The standard public discourse made these actions possible. These were our governments, our authorities. Our responsibility cannot be denied.

What’s more, this will not be the last shocking revelation. There must be much more to come.
And so an official national apology was a good thing. But it will not be nearly enough. For a start, everything must come out and be made clear. Full responsibility, whatever that involves, must be taken. The political, legal and bureaucratic cringing, prevarication, negotiating over which documents to release, when, in what conditions, only make the whole tragedy more humiliating for all Canadians, aboriginal and otherwise. How can any of us agree to live together in any sort of healthy relationship if there is not clarity, as well as full and concrete responsibility taken for the past?
..........
 I have never heard a First Nations, Métis or Inuit person say they wanted to be seen primarily as a victim. That would be marginalizing and demeaning. What they want is that their situation be understood. They want responsibility taken. They want to be heard. They want their dignity back.
That is why there is such insistence on respect for the treaties. We are all signatories. We are all treaty people. Those treaty agreements shaped Canada. The landed immigrant becomes a treaty person the instant she or he swears allegiance as a citizen of Canada.
What indigenous peoples are after is their full and proper place on this territory. They are the original founding pillar of everything done here. Their influence on the shape and habits of this country has been and remains enormous.
..........
The simple truth is that we are all witnesses to the remarkable comeback of the aboriginal peoples. This will mean fundamental shifts in power, in financing and in how we all live together. We can pretend this is not happening; we can manoeuvre in order to delay it. But it is going to happen. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by embracing this comeback as living proof of the strength of these cultures and peoples. We are witnessing how central they are to the future of this country.
Now is the time to listen to what they are saying and understand what they are calling for.

- Submitted by Gareth

Mourning for the Earth

To confront climate change, we may need to first deal with our grief.

 

Photo Credit: Erik Mark Sandberg (Sojouners)

WHY IS IT so hard for people to respond effectively to the reality of climate change?
Changing people’s minds—with facts, tables, and predictions—has proven extremely difficult. Even showing people the miraculous beauty of the planet alongside the predicted losses is not working. Guilt, anxiety, and anger can be motivating forces, but they have debilitating side effects: They are all soul-destroying.
So I wonder about our hearts. Have we ignored our emotional and spiritual connections to the planet? Could the noise swirling around climate change—science, politics, media blitzes, as well as the weather disasters themselves—drown out the voice of a loss so profound that it rests unnamed in our souls? Could our breaking hearts be part of the reason we are immobilized?

These are the questions Katharine M Preston speaks to in her Sojourners article "Mourning for the Earth" (August 2013).  She invites people of faith to understand that grief is a process, not a state of being, and that the well-known stages of grieving (made familiar by E. Kuebler-Ross) can equip us to move through the profound losses related to climate change.

Preston writes that many turn to faith communities in moments of grief.  She asks:  Could churches help us work through our grief so we can embrace the radical changes that must be made.

The article concludes with this quote from the Talmud (attributed):   Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work. But neither are you free to abandon it.

You can read the entire article here.

-submitted by Gareth

Hold out your hands to beauty

PATRICK LANE

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 05 2013
Last updated Monday, Jul. 08 2013

At 74, Patrick Lane remains one of Canada’s most celebrated poets. Last week, he was named to the Order of Canada. And last month he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna – particularly meaningful since the school is just down the road from Vernon, where Mr. Lane grew up and spent his early years scrounging a living. In his address to the convocation, he spoke powerfully of those tough, formative years and, in particular, of an extraordinary incident that has affected his life ever since. It taught him the value of beauty. When he finished, there was silence, followed by rapturous applause.
  

Photo source:  deviantART.com

Back in early December of 1958, I was 19 years old, living with my wife and baby boy in a two-room apple picker’s shack a few miles down the road from here. I had a job driving dump truck for a two-bit outfit that was working on a short stretch of highway just down the hill from where this university was built so many years later. I remember leaving the shack and walking out to stand by the highway in the wind and snow. I stood there shivering in my canvas coat as I waited to be picked up by the grader operator in his rusted pickup truck. The sky was hard and grey. Its only gift that winter day was ice disguised as a fragile, bitter snow.
As I stood there in the false dawn, I looked up for a moment and as I did an iridescent blue butterfly the size of my palm fluttered down and rested on the sleeve of my coat just above my wrist. It was winter, it was cold and I knew the Okanagan Valley where I had lived most of my young life did not harbour huge, shiny blue butterflies, not even in summer. ...

I have never forgotten it and know the encounter changed me. There are mornings in our lives when beauty falls into our hands and when that happens, we must do what we can to nurture and protect it. That we sometimes fail must never preclude our striving.

Read the convocation speech here.

See a video of the convocation speech here.  Lane's speech commences at about the 5 minute mark.

- submitted by Kathleen

New Yorker Cartoon

 

This was the cartoon from my New Yorker calendar yesterday. Appropriate for our group.  Nancy

- submitted by Nancy

The Garden Remains

You'll find a most thoughtful meditation by Gary Paterson (United Church moderator) in his blog (linked in the Recommended Blogs list).  His meditation reflects on the death of his mother, but also finds hope in the garden that he visits from his past.

Read "The Garden Remains" here.

-Submitted by Gareth

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

                                

    Touch the earth lightly... every day.

Submitted by Karla

photo by Cori E.

Jacob's Wound - A Search for the Spirit of Wildness

When, at our last meeting, Mike drew our attention to the article in Globe and Mail about the federal government's abandonment of the prairie grasslands (see previous post), I hadn't initially noticed who the author is.  When I did notice Tervor Herriot's name, I recognized his name as author of Jacob's Wound, a book I've read in the past.  So I went back to it, and am reading it again.  One reviewer describes the book this way:  "Composed of nature writing, philosophy, religious history, journalism, and memoir, the book is an exploration of the “spirit of wildness” and an evocation of an Earth-based spirituality".

Given our group's interest in living simply, and living in harmony with the earth, I'd like to share one section of the book.  I think this also connects with Karla's reference to her walk through the Charleswood forest with Mike earlier in the week, a walk that clearly inspired thoughtful conversation.

I hope you enjoy this poetic reflection on the power of "wildness".  So, this is from Jacob's Wound, pages 30 & 31.

- submitted by Gareth

Photo-Source: McClelland.com

Shelter 3

Like everyone else, I get out of town to be in a place where a good chunk of nature remains available to my senses.  When our souls want restoring we do not go sit in the middle of parking lots.  We go where life is a little less scripted, a little less conscripted.

An older couple stopped by for a visit one afternoon while we were out at the Land.  Retired people, well-off, well-educated.  We sat gazing out over the valley and Lake Katepwa in the middle distance.  On cue, the woman said, "My, what a place!  I can just feel the stress melting away."

You hear such talk, the same clinical terms, from people for whom a gravel road is an adventure.  The wind fresh from poplars and meadows eddies through  their  blood and yet they are at a loss to name the thing that moves them.  One step beyond constructed and landscaped surfaces and we are in terra incognita.  We are dying within our shelter.  People used to die of exposure.  Nothing gets a piece of us any more if we can help it.  Wind, rain, ice, and sun, the creatures that bite or hook into us, wait for us on the other side of doors and walls and caskets.

Once, children inoculated themselves with mud and microbes.  Remember?  People pulled foals from mares.  Woke to crowing birds.  Who stumbles now in storm from porch to barn door?  The long hours of lying in grass are gone.  Time with lambs and calves, bird nests and dragonflies made us.  Time apart from them is unmaking us.
-------
Pre-dawn dispatches from the cerebellum urge a lowering of barriers, a return to the senses:  abandon shelter, find communion in exposure.  See this luffing sail, hear this canine howl, taste this bread, smell this violet, touch this stone.  Blessed are the unwanted abrasions, invasions, and privations;  the grace of all that, in eluding and pursuing our flesh, draws us nearer sacrament.

Chris Hedges' "The Treason of the Intellectuals"

This is in reference to Nancy's earlier post (April 2), in which she informed us about the speaking engagement of Chris Hedges on September 21 at the West End Cultural Centre.  A friend of mine alerted me to his most recent column in Truthdig, where he is a regular columnist.

The Treason of the Intellectuals

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it. ...

(Read the whole article here.)

- Submitted by Gareth 

Bono: "God is in the Slums"

Photo-Source: http://webpages.scu.edu

This statement was part of a speech Bono made at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast.  It was used in yesterday's Just Living meeting, as a prayer to conclude our biblical exploration of Amos, the Old Testament prophet who, over 2,500 years ago, was God's voice calling for justice.

“God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”- Bono

Bono's speech, dubbed a sermon by many, was delivered on February 2, 2006 at the Washington DC Hilton, by activist and rock star Bono, to the 51st annual National Prayer Breakfast, attended by President George Bush and hundreds of national leaders. Bono is an energetic, non-partisan AIDS and anti-poverty activist who focuses his crusade on Africa. His remarks at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast have been widely acclaimed as a uniquely powerful blend of faith and the mission of governments. 

You can read the rest of his speech at this 2006 event here.

- Submitted by Gareth

PALM SUNDAY - AN UNEXPECTED PERSPECTIVE

The Donkey                                                            

When fishes flew and forests walked 

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil's walking parody 

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me:

I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

G.K.Chesterton

Submitted by Karla W.

WORDS THAT INSPIRE

NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD. 
INDEED, IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS!

Margaret Mead

posted by Karla W.

Sonnets of the Cross

After posting Bathanti's poem a few days ago, I wanted to know more about his poetry.  Joseph Bathanti's "Sonnets of the Cross" are based on the fourteen Stations of the Cross.  The spirituality embodied in these sonnets is "unconventional and iconoclastic".  Their Christ is a "brilliant laborer with a blazing social conscience and abiding love who is wrongly convicted then executed despite His innocence".  The collection is available from the publisher.


http://www.jacarpress.com/2013/02/

submitted by Gareth N.

Jesus Is Stripped of His Garments

I find this poem powerful, especially now, during this season of Lent.  It is published in the March 2013 edition of Sojourners.  Submitted by Gareth N.

Hemorrhaging from the concertina
crown, brass knuckles, scourging, cigarette burns,
lurching the last meter of Golgotha
where He must dangle three hours in urns
of japing ether, He drops His bloody tree.
Executioners rip His clothes away,
cut cards for His keepsake convict jersey.
He's not uttered a word except to pray
for the spike drivers limbering their mauls
to fasten the scripture of agony.
He's ready for the juice, the black hood, spalls
of sniper fire, the hangman's ennui.
Naked upon the whorled slab he lay,
dreaming of the governor's last-second stay.

Joseph Bathanti, the poet laureate of North Carolina, teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. His most recent collection is Sonnets of the Cross (Jacar Press, 2012).