Faithful Philly Forum

I had dinner last night with 100 plus people in the city in the most novel ministry. There were college aged students and senior citizens, various races, older women with an eye to fashion and men who had come in off the streets. We reflected the society as a whole and, because Broad Street ministries (the Presbyterian ministry at Broad and Arch) is committed to inclusive hospitality, we sat at round tables covered with flowered tableclothes and bouquets of mums and ate a full meal, free. The requirements for us were that we showed our appreciation to the many volunteers who assisted wth the preparation and serving and that we have conversations with the strangers to our right and left. Where else was I going to meet a young wannabe film maker, an artist activist, and an 87 year old World War II veteran who forcefully critiqued a president who was not pursuing peace but prolonging war, a president he had voted for!? There was lots of conversation happening. It was as if we all realized this was a unique and incredible opportunity to engage with a wide array of people whom we would never have met otherwise. And, though it is in a church building and the host was the minister there was not one attempt to prosyltize or advertize or coerce. Our hosts were Christians whose only agenda is to create a way to break down the isolation and anonymity of city life. And it appears to work! Set the banquet table of inclusivity and people will come to the feast. Sounds pretty biblical to me. (Bill Golderer is the pastor.)

Keith Olbermann has been providing powerful commentary during many of his nightly broadcasts (8PM edt) on MSNBC. His focus has been on the anti-democratic tendencies of the Bush Administration and its general incompetence.

These commentaries are striking. First, it is a complete sea change that these pointed attacks are allowed at all. You may remember that Donohue was cancelled in late 2002 because he dared to air anti-Iraq war opinions on his show.

It is also interesting that Olbermann on MSNBC (and Cafferty on CNN) are now able to find the anti-Bush voice. Today roughly 65% of Americans disapprove of Bush and 51% want him impeached according to Newsweek. So is this just piling on?

If we are to be a free society in which the empire (see Walter Bruggemann) can be challenged it is important to be able to allow anti-empire voices to be heard even when it is unpopular.

It is good that Olbermann is speaking up. It is remarkable in fact and I fear for his job should the R’s claim victory on November 7.

Perhaps those of us in the peace/justice camp need be more assertive when our views are in the minority. When we are attacked again there will no doubt be another effort to intimidate/mute our voices. Hopefully we will remember Olbermann?

“I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.”  Rumi, 1207-1273

Maybe I’m a little naïve.  I keep seeing signs of hope. Hope that humankind will not ultimately self-destruct; that peace, reason, compassion, human goodness might prevail.  The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.  The  microcredit movement has spread throughout the world changing lives and communities.  Yunus made an initial loan of $27 to 42 women.  Last year more than 100 million people received small loans from the many institutions that have followed his lead.

Among other hopeful signs,  I’ve noticed that recently positive representations of Islam are finally appearing in more abundance.  After 9/11 leaders were careful to call Islam a religion of peace, but after awhile there seemed to be nothing but a barrage of violent images – not just name-calling,  (“Islamist fascists”)  but serious articles on why Islam fosters violence.  In the meantime millions of Muslims live out their lives in peace; moderate scholars continue to offer flexibility and reason in the face of fundamentalism (as they do in Christianity); feminist Muslim women lift strong, creative voices; the world prepares to celebrate the year of Rumi.  Lately these more positive images have been getting press.

Perhaps it’s the prayers of Ramadan having their effect.  Muslims throughout the world called to fasting, prayer, charity.  I was honored to attend an Iftar dinner a week ago sponsored by the Philadelphia Dialog Forum.  After calls to prayer we listened to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim speakers.  At the table Muslim friends explained that during Ramadan it is  expected that they will include others in the breaking of the fast.  They are called to a particular concern for the poor, and the inclusion, in warm hospitality, of their neighbors.  This was such an experience.

We don’t need much reflection to remember that a Christian president invaded a Muslim country leading to the death of  thousands of innocents.   Perhaps in this last week of Ramadan we might join our Muslim sisters and brothers in prayer, repentance, a particular concern for the poor, and intentionally reach out to our neighbor.  Through our own attention to interfaith hospitality and dialogue we might as Jesus said, “be bold enough to hope.”

Last Friday I gave myself the day to play around and relax a little, having had a fairly rigorous week in school. I went and sat in a coffee shop with a magazine for an hour, got a massage at the Massage Arts School and saw the movie Jesus Camp.

The movie left me shaken and I spent the rest of the day trying to walk off the feelings of sadness and fear that would not let go. It was more disturbing than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. It is a documentary made by the film division of the A&E channel, about a movement of evangelical Christianity and their intentions to convert and indoctrinate their children into a particular belief system. They are trying to make these kids into soldiers in God’s army and I find it scary.

There was footage of prayer meetings, where the pastor essentially tells 6 and 7 and 8 year olds that they are bad and that the only way to be good, to be loved, to be righteous is to accept these beliefs. The children would be weeping, tears streaming down their faces, as the hiccupped into the microphone how terribly sorry they are and that they will try to be better. It killed me to watch.

I realize that as a Unitarian Universalist, my cred as a Christian is shaky at best. It’s a designation I don’t even always feel is appropriate to my set of beliefs. But I am a believer in love, justice and peace, concepts that I think are inherent to Christianity. I didn’t see any of those things in this movie. It scares me to see that people are teaching children a Christian belief system that is completely devoid of compassion or mutual respect. It doesn’t seem to bode well for the world.
Children’s Boot Camp for the Culture Wars [NYT]

I went to see a preview showing of Flags of our Fathers tonight. It is a movie about the invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II and the men who were immortalized on film while raising an American flag on the highest point of the island. I sat through the screening with my stomach churning, fingers splayed in front of my eyes, trying to avoid seeing some of the worst moments.

My mind raced in an attempt to absorb the horror of the now-historic war that I was watching and I started thinking about the current war. I kept coming around to the absolute waste of human potential that it is. What harm it does to the people who survive it. I didn’t leave the movie with any answers or solutions, and the walk home didn’t deliver an epiphany. I was opposed to war before I walked into that theater tonight and I walked out shaken and silent, more convicted in my belief that this is not the way to solve things. I believe that that was probably part of Clint Eastwood intention in making this movie, and I hope that others see it the way I did, as an effective anti-war statement.

“There is that of God in everyone.”  I heard this often during my sojourn living and working with Friends.  My own Quaker daughter said it best, I thought, when she said “At any time, with any person, you may be looking into the face of God – listening to God speak.”  What a different reality it would be if we paid attention to that idea; if we looked for that of God in the other.  It might prevent us from freezing people into categories of otherness, separating them from us.  It might prevent what I consider a growing and terrifying divide among and within religions…simply stopping for a moment to see  divinity within the other.  Maybe we wouldn’t drop bombs on people then; or blow each other up in such a variety of ways, knowing that we are once again killing God.  Each day we are offered a chance to see the light of divinity, the real presence of God among us … each day in our dealings with one another, in our actions, our choices, our policies.  Each day we create a world in which God is vibrantly present.  Or we choose to let Her die - again.

And the killing gets easier.  The most absurd thing I have witnessed in public policy recently is a refusal to limit the number of handguns that one can purchase per year in Pennsylvania.  Why do handguns even exist?  Why do we need any, let alone more than 12 per person per year?  We know where the guns end up. Killing children.  Killing those moments of divinity. Every day we create a world with or without the beauty of God present.

What a drama in DC! The events unfolding in the upper echelons of power in DC are about the ways men with power have used it to shore up the status quo and protect one another rather than use it to protect the young people working with them. And, that is pretty despicable. But when we know of a dangerous situation and keep silent??. (”To those who know to do good and don’t do it….”seems like a Bible verse there.)

But how do we use power in ways that bring about good? I mean history is full of stories of people thinking they are doing good and then discovering that rather than helping as they intended they have even made things worse. Usually it is because the paternalistic urge takes precedence over the listening that should occur first. And of course those of us with the power that comes with privilege who are oftentimes (or usually) totally oblivious to the ways we throw our power around! Sometimes we insist we really don’t have any! (And no doubt people just shake their heads at our self-delusions.) Surely with power comes pitfalls but surely we can find ethical ways to use our power to bring about justice. Surely. BD

As most know, there was a school shooting in Paradise, PA on Monday.  A man walked into a Amish one-room school house and shot ten girls, ages 6 to 13.  Five died and five have lived.

Most communities, when faced with violent, painful loss, react with a blend of pain, grief and immense anger.  In this situation, the tone set by the community of Amish to which the girl belonged to has been one of grace and love.  The surrounding population has picked up on it, and the response of has been gentle and deeply caring.  I am staggered by the amount of love that has poured forth as a result of this horror, and I am changed by it.

I’ve started thinking about what the world would be like if the families of the victims gathered with the families of the perpetrator(s) to grieve and pray every time a violent act such as this was committed.  It seems to me that that would be a revolutionary act.

If you have a moment for something thought provoking, check out Andrew Sullivan’s essay on religion and current politics. Very compelling stuff. He extends it on his own blog to be the base of his conservative political world view–basically that we need to protect ourselves from the hubris of certainty. God does play a wonderful trick on us when some of us (like me) are made certain of our own progressive vision of the reign of God–and then find ourselves nodding in solidarity with a conservative blogger. Perhaps the impulse to nod is teaching more about the reign of God than anything else. What Sullivan ultimately invites us to do is to risk open conversation about our faith–to not let the extremes of absolute belief and absolute non-belief hold control of the conversation about faith. 

Some days it is best not to read the newspaper. How shall we be faithful in the context of a Congress who has voted that Habeas Corpus does not apply to some people? When we read of the Canadian citizen who was removed from LaGuardia, interrogated, assumed guilty by the US and sent to Jordan and Syria where he was subsequently tortured? When a lecturer at Penn tells us that 80% of the world’s infectious diseases comes from unsafe water and that the UN is not going to make its 2015 goal to reduce by 50% the number of people who don’t have access to safe water. Even a Penn professor in criminology is saying we need to be talking about the morality of the death penalty! Then a seriously disturbed father of three goes to a school and murders three little girls before commits suicide and we reel about trying to get our heads around that! Let’s not forget the fox in the chicken house who was supposed to be protecting exploited children who was himself  apparently sending illicit pornographic communication to young boys! And this just in, Condi did indeed get briefed by Tenet about an imminent attack and she dismissed it. And this is just the news today! How shall we be faithful today?? I think it might be best to say “One day at a time.” BD