Freedom Plaza participant explains protests.
  

The Spirit of Freedom Square in Cairo, Egypt,

Comes to Washington, DC, October 6, 2011

Dear Friends,

The wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq rage on. For ten years the people of Afghanistan have suffered US bombing, invasion and occupation of their country. Thousands of innocent people have died. Through our military actions there we are recruiting ever more people to Al-Qaeda and the war on terrorism could continue forever. The wars and US addiction to militarism are bankrupting the United States and our government is forced to make drastic cuts in social services including funds for schools, libraries, job training, and programs for the young and elderly. 

We have prayed, we have written letters to our Congresspeople, we have vigiled, demonstrated and gone to jail, but our government has not listened to the majority of American people who want to end these wars. If not now, When, If not us, Who?

NOW is the time to speak with our lives and bodies that this senseless killing and destruction must end. This is the time the American people must DEMAND that we bring the Billions of dollars squandered in these wars home to meet human needs at home.  Security is found not through wars, military bases all over the world and a new generation of nuclear weapons, but in  building a world in which every person can live with dignity with food, education, healthcare and a home to live in. How much safer we would be if we contributed billions for improving the lives of people all over the world rather than for weapons to kill?

Now is the time to bring the Spirit of Tahrir Square in Egypt to the United States and demand that our government listen to the people instead of the military industrial complex and the corporations.

We invite you to join thousands of us who will gather in Freedom Plaza in Washington DC October 6 to begin sustained nonviolent resistance to the wars and American militarism and demand that we bring the billions of dollars home to our communities across this country which so badly need these funds.

Please look at the website www.october2011.org and if the Spirit moves you, join us for a day, a week or as long as you can. Thousands of us will nonviolently demand:

• End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending and bring the billions of $ home
   
• Tax the Rich and corporations
   
• Protect the Social Security net, strengthen Social Security and Medicare for all
   
• End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests
   
• Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation
   
• Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages
   
• Get Money out of politics

Hope to see many of you in Washington and please help spread the word!

Peace,
David and Jan Hartsough
September, 2011
www.peaceworkersus.org

This Easter I have been depressed
about the fate of the Japanese
as they face their natural
and man-made disasters.
It is hard to imagine
how they will extricate themselves
from their tomb of radioactive sorrows
kin washed out to sea
birth defects that will continue for centuries.

A friend sent me a link to a video
about Christians in a Beirut restaurant
suddenly standing up and singing
a beautiful Easter hymn.
He is risen!

The video inspired
a whole flood of new thoughts in me
about the spiritual meaning of the resurrection.
If one begins with the idea that God is love,
then every moment in the Christian tradition
would have a meaning related to radiant compassion
if we were to look for it.
Who is risen?  What is risen?

The crucifixion
is not only the experience of Jesus.
It is our experience as well.
The love that we were born to live
is crucified daily
by capitalism, communism, industrialism
or whatever system of domination
we happen to live under.
But the miracle is
that you can't kill love.
And that is what the resurrection is about.

Even though our faith in life
often seems utterly destroyed
by ten thousand clever swindlers
smiling nuclear power plant salesmen
drug companies that sell tainted medicine
politicians who go to church on Sunday
and support the practice of torture the rest of the week
naval officers with lots of ribbons explaining why
the whales are not as important as our fear and greed
and must be sacrificed to the sonar gods
old generals cling to power
children die in the streets
the list goes on and on…

Even though we bear these thousand crucifixions
even though we live
in what seems like an endless tomb
with nothing to comfort us
but the bones of John and Robert Kennedy
the bones of Martin Luther King
the bones of Archbishop Romero
which is to say
with nothing at all to comfort us
even then
you can't kill love.

Coming from the ancient roots of life
unfurling in our DNA like a fern unfolding
when we have given up all hope
when all reason to believe has left us
love still comes back to claim us
saying you are my very own children
go forth from this dark place
and shine with my light

that we would bear all these wounds
these savage betrayals
and still come again to care about people
still come again to care
about all the creatures of the Earth
is truly a resurrection as miraculous
as the bringing of a dead body
back to life.

WE are risen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BacXevGR2qA&feature=youtube_gdata_player
 

Who are you?

In this essay I’m going to explore some of the ways in which we are grander than our wildest dreams, and I am also going to explore one of the greatest paradoxes of being human: the fact of simultaneously being great and small. 

There is a movie currently in theaters that provides me with a wonderful jumping off place. The movie is called Limitless.  But it could have just as easily been titled, Limited, because the main character, falling into possession of a cognition enhancing wonder drug, uses his newly expanded powers in service only of ancient motives. He is now smart enough to accomplish practically anything, so he chooses to become a stock market wizard.  Then he goes for the really big stuff: he becomes a player in the mergers and acquisitions game on Wall Street.  And he persuades his beautiful ex-girlfriend to come back to him.  Cure malaria? Forget it.  Cause the leaders of the world to see that peace makes more sense than war? Not a chance.  Truly, this is new wine poured into very old bottles.  But as flawed as it is by its limited horizon of possibilities, the film still raises a deeply important question, how could each of us grow into greater fullness of being?, even if the film itself gives a shallow answer.

Spirit Within Matter — Sculpture by Vijali

One of the wonderful paradoxes of our time is the way that science is offering deeper and deeper support for a new spirituality-in-the-middle-of-life.  By spirituality, I mean a sense of wonder, gratitude, connectedness and compassion, that is evoked by the continuing stream of new discoveries about both the universe and the human body.  This is a new development for several reasons.  Over the past several centuries, science and religion have competed fiercely for social influence, and along the way came to a truce by reinventing the old spirit versus matter dichotomy.  The tacit truce required that scientists stop saying anything about the spiritual life, and that religionists stop making claims about the physical universe.  This stale truce is now breaking down, which to my mind is not a bad thing, since human beings are both spiritual and material, and need a unifying rather than a dividing way of looking at themselves.  In figures like John Muir and Walt Whitman, you can see spirituality both breaking free from traditional religion and also breaking away from the spirit versus matter dichotomy.  That process, what one might call the reemergence of nature religion or Earth spirituality in Western culture, continues to this very day at an accelerating pace. New Druids take heart, your time has come!

Evolution of White Dwarf Star – Hubble Telescope

The Hubble photographs of stars being born, and of zillions of galaxies filling up what were previously imagined to be empty quadrants of space, represent one of the most dramatic and inspiring streams of recent scientific information flowing into the mind of Earth spirituality.  There is another stream of information coming to us, not as dramatic as star pictures, but much more intimate, with lots of implications about the people we can become and the world we can create.  This is the information about our brains, each person’s garden of approximately one hundred billion neurons.  One author called it “the three-pound universe.”   Fifty years ago, biologist Jacques Monod could sneer, “what is the brain but a machine made of meat?” Very few people talk like that anymore.  Just as the Hubble telescope dramatically changed our view of “empty space,” new brain studies are dramatically expanding our vision of the six inches between our ears.

Current estimates are that the human body contains approximately one hundred trillion cells, including approximately one hundred billion neurons.  The community that we call our body also contains approximately a thousand trillion bacteria, most of whom do their best to keep our show on the road.  One scientist made an estimate of how much information is stored in all these cells and came up with an estimate of around thirty-five trillion gigabytes, which is to say, really a lot.

So while we might be inclined, when looking at the vastness of the night sky, to imagine ourselves as mere specks in endless space, I want to invite you to explore the other side of the paradox. We may be a speck, but we are also infinite. Each person is a living universe, and as a culture we have hardly begun to mobilize the inner resources of each of those universes.  We are more inclined to see ourselves as nothing, then to see ourselves as an infinity of resources waiting to be made manifest in works of creative love.  (We also have a tendency to shoot one another with a thoughtlessness which is mind-boggling, so willing are we to erase these evolving universes.)  What of our brainpower we are able to mobilize, we often use to reach the narrowest of goals, like the hero of Limitless.

One of the interesting aspects of evolution is that evolutionary processes themselves appear to be evolving.  Evolution at its most rudimentary level seems fairly brainless: try everything and keep whatever works.  But that apparently brainless process of trial and error has produced brains that plan, and love, and play peek-a-boo with their toddlers so that the toddler's brains will develop. If a fundamentally brainless process can produce brains, all bets are off as to what is going on in the universe.  Planning represents the internalization of trial and error, in which different courses of action are imagined, and their consequences are imagined.  Not as good as real trial and error, but much safer and getting better with the passing of time. Human beings are smack dab in the middle of this evolution of evolution.  It remains to be seen how far we will be able to carry it forward. Fights could become negotiation sessions, a kind of a etherialization of conflict.  Competition and cooperation could merge and produce a family of creative hybrids that produce more and waste less, both in terms of resources and in terms of lives. 

This universe of which we are a part, which is continually changing and learning in and through us, does not fit very well with our current, winner-takes-all, everyone else becomes a slave, version of capitalism, which is spiraling toward self-destruction.  In this version of capitalism, only the titans at the top get to dream big.  Everyone else has to have smaller and smaller dreams.  Your destiny is not to use your one hundred trillion cells to produce something great and beautiful.  Your destiny is only to wash the boss’s limousine, and then go back to your tiny room and comfort yourself by watching men on TV trying to get a little white ball to roll across a piece of lawn and land in a little cup, while your teeth fall out because you can’t afford a dentist.  Every social scheme has it set of uniforms, into which it will try to zip its population.  That’s why we need poets, science fiction writers, exotic religions, visionary artists and brain scientists, because we need to be able to dream outside the current box.  Discovering that you are an entire creative universe with arms and legs is a way of reaffirming your fundamental human dignity, no matter what forces are trying to push you into a life of obedient, unchanging and unthinking servitude.

As we reach out to discover what our hundred trillion cells could become, we may collide with the smallness of the life expectations of the people around us.  I see one of our tasks to be turning this collision into a transformation. Our task is not to criticize the people around us, our task is to live more radiantly and with more abundance of spirit, so that the people around us feel invited and encouraged to live a more expansive life. 

 
What Sort of Aliveness is the Universe Trying to Give Birth to in Me?

And what are the dimensions of that more expansive life?  What qualities does the universe seem to be trying to evolve in and through us.  I have spent most of my adult life exploring this question with the help of the writings of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, and many experiments in living.  They, in turn, were influenced by hundreds of thinkers, so the list actually represents a consensus of many minds. Here is my working list of the qualities of full aliveness in each of us which are waiting to be cultivated, in exactly the same way that our biceps are waiting to fill out as the result of good workouts.  An equally interesting way to describe these fourteen qualities is to say that each of us was born pregnant with all of them, and our life is the process of giving birth to all of them in greater and greater fullness and completeness: the infinity hidden within the speck you call “me.”  Each of these qualities has no final boundary, there is no limit as to how deeply they could be developed, or how intricately they could be interwoven.

I present these radiant qualities as if they were branches of a tree, feathering out into finer and finer detail, because the tree form is such a familiar model.  Because these fourteen qualities continuously interweave and support one another, a more revealing (but more complex) way of presenting them would be a Mandala, as shown below.

Mandala by Adam Apollo Walsh

1.  The Openness to Learn/Change/Evolve Branch:  Understanding life as a continuous process of developing new awarenesses, understandings and skills.  Understanding everything that we call a "problem" as a challenge to learn something new, to re-evaluate one's ideas, assumptions and behaviors, and to develop new skills.  Embracing problems (personal, social, political, ecological) as opportunities, rather than running away from them.

2.  The Compassion Branch:  caring, lovingkindness, respect, generosity, concern for the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing of all creatures.

3.  The Truthfulness Branch:   honestly, sincerity, genuineness, congruence (inner condition matches outer expression), turning away from self-deception and deception of others in all one's relationships.

4.  The Courage Branch:  courage, hopefulness, faithfulness to others and to one's deepest ideals, a deep sense of self-worth that allows one to face one's mistakes, psychological empowerment or "agency" (a sense that one can influence one's environment in order to meet one's needs, or the needs of one's children).

5.  The Awareness Branch:  Learning to pay sustained attention, and to include more and more in one's field of attention.  Often accomplished through meditation, contemplation, quiet prayer, some forms of martial arts and sports training, and native traditions of hunting.

6.  The Creativity Branch:  creatively, curiosity, exploration (with openness to new experience), thinking outside the box, willingness to try something new, acceptance of  moments of failure as part of the creative process.

7. The Commitment/Sustained Engagement Branch:  Continuity of energetic engagement, patience, perseverance, "Seven Generations" perspective, promise-keeping, fruit orchard tending, the long view, raising children.  Turning away from instant gratification and short term solutions with giant long terms costs (such as nuclear power, lotteries that supposedly fund education while making the poor poorer, or the current practice of states selling their office buildings to private investors, and then immediately leasing them back, in order to bring in a temporary flood of cash that supposedly "solves" state budget problems while leaving the state taxpayers burdened with decades of high rent payments).

8. The Gratitude Branch:  Expressing gratitude, appreciation, wonder, awe, receiving each moment as a gift, lowering one's threshold of delight, sympathetic delight in the happiness of others.  Taking delight in those things that are available to all (the sun, the sea, the sky), relinquishing all senses of entitlement that come at the expense of others (my "right" as an American to any oil in the world, for example).

9. The Responsibility Branch:  Mindful of cause and effect, aware of the interwovenness of our lives and ecological fates, willing to acknowledge mistakes and make amends and restoration.

10. The Forgiveness Branch:  Forgiving oneself and others, willingness to start over, focusing on making a better present and future, rather than punishing others (or self) for the past, focusing on direction of development rather measuring oneself and others against static images of  perfection.

11.  The Emotional Aliveness Branch — celebrating and grieving:  Open to experience both joy and sorrow, both frustration and fulfillment, both excitement and stillness.  Moving away from "playing dead" as a coping style.

12.  The Finding Meaning/Making Meaning Branch: Organizing and expressing our experiences into coherent patterns of words, music, movement, imagery, celebration and ritual, each according to their temperament (following along the lines of Rilke's advice in Letters to a Young Poet).  

13.  The Transforming Power and Spiritual Dimensions of Beauty: Open to experience beauty (in the Navajo sense of cosmic harmony)  in nature and in the human personality. Also open to experience the ugliness we have created  in nature and human life: war, oppression, exploitation, pollution and extinction.  Open to be a bridge for the transformation of the world from ugly ways toward beautiful ways of living, treating one another and caring for one another as  “all my relations.” 

14. The Spiral of Nurturing Branch:  Active concern for the personal development of every person one meets/knows, in terms of the first thirteen dimensions shown above.  Active concern for the unfolding into full personhood of all people on Earth, active concern for the Web of Life.  Evolution selects for life that nurtures new life.

 
A Closing Meditation

Personal unfolding will never be easy, since there is a lot of momentum to stay asleep and undeveloped, coming from both within us and outside of us.  So we need ways of waking ourselves up, a bell to ring in the dormitory of our minds, to summon our infinite inner resources to the tasks of creative love, and the building of a new civilization based on the fourteen qualities described above.  As some of you will know from my little book on the evolution of prayer, I am an active explorer of new forms of prayer, meditation and affirmation.  I invite you to explore repeating the following affirmation, or something similar, as you are falling asleep, and just as you wake up.  I also invite you to accompany this affirmation with whatever vivid imagery would express for you the meaning of these words.  If you could imagine yourself as being a composite of Buddha,  Jesus, Catherine the Great, Mme. Curie, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Joan of Arc, St. Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas, all rolled together, plus any other noble people you would like to add to this list, I am convinced that you would have only touched the beginning edge of all that life wants to express through you.  The emerging picture of the brain suggests to me that we all hold greater possibilities than we can possibly imagine.  May each of us open, in our own unique way, to be a garden of eternity.

With every breath and every step

I open my life to infinite well-being,

and to the unfolding of the Universe

in me and through me.

With every breath and every step

I commit myself to the well-being

of all sentient creatures.

Starstorm — Fractal by Vicky Brago-Mitchell

Infinity Hidden in a Speck by Dennis Rivers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

By Dennis Rivers — December 28, 2010

 
One idea I have been developing in my journals for many years is a "theory of moral overload."  In my theory, we each have a nervous system that has evolved to handle the amount of bad news, failures and emergencies that might be generated in a circle a few miles wide.  But now we participate in a mechanically connected world which brings to our awareness many more requests for help than we can ever respond to.  As a result of this, it is very difficult to feel good about oneself, no matter how hard one tries to be helpful.  Every situation of suffering we give our efforts to improve is accompanied by thousands we could not reach. The technologies that have expanded our world have inadvertently nailed us to a psychological cross, which influences all our relationships as we struggle to reassert some personal boundaries, hide from our overwhelming sense of  failure and salvage some shred of self esteem.

So one aspect of moral overload concerns unanswered cries for help.  Another aspect concerns living with the consequences of actions taken on one's behalf.  I recently became aware of the problem of unexploded cluster weapons on the ground in Laos.  During the Vietnam war, the United States dropped 250 million tennis-ball sized bomblets on Laos, a third of which did not explode when they first hit the ground. That remnant, 80 million of them, continue to kill and injure today, long after the armies have gone home. Here is an example of something that was done on my behalf, but it is both so large, physically, and so bad, morally, that my mind boggles as I try to get a grip on it. So big, and so bad, that it would take many, many lifetimes for me to begin to make amends. I am sure you could quickly provide another ten examples, and so could I.  How much of my personhood can I salvage from this moral wreck? 

Here are three responses that I see as the psyche's way of reasserting her integrity in the face of the crazy-making flood.

One possible response I see at work around me is to define global moral challenges as belonging to communities rather than individuals, so that the individual does not feel like a failure in relation to all those calls for help.  I like this idea, but it assumes that we are each part of a functioning community, or could become such with a reasonable amount of efforts, neither of which is true for many people today.  But I see many efforts to build communities of shared concerns. And this could be a major avenue of development as we seek to overcome the severe limitations of the "Lone Ranger" model of moral action in the world. 

A second response would be for a person to develop an inward culture of forgiveness, in which one accepted that one lived in a broken and suffering world.  This would involve considerable emotional maturity, and an acceptance of one's finiteness.  Although in the face of the sufferings of the world, I might earnestly wish that I were a hundred people rather than just one, focusing intensely on forgiveness might allow me to forgive myself for being only one, and find some sustaining satisfaction in embracing a smaller role.  I think our irrational desire to be a hundred people is a perfectly natural response to the technologically induced over-exposure, and to the actual fact that industrial civilization is running amok and destroying the planet.  These extreme circumstances may generate more grief and guilt than the human body can tolerate, which a life of conscious forgiveness can begin to address ON ITS OWN TERMS.  That is to say, not telling people they are irrational for wanting to do more than one person's part, but rather, honoring the beautifully irrational element in our love of others.

A third response to being a finite person confronted with what seem like infinite needs and sorrows, makes use of our capacity of symbolism. In relation to these cries for help, I am involved in some sort of conversation with God, or Being, or Nature, or "Someone."  Each act of kindness is a moment in that conversation, and represents all the other acts of kindness I might have performed if I had been capable of doing more.  This is the spirit of the Jewish tradition that if you save one person, you save the entire world. It also reminds me of the saying of Mother Teresa, that we cannot do great things in this world, but we can do small things with great love. This makes each effort to heal the pain of the world a sacrament, in that it is an action which is both meaningful in itself and also a symbol of a larger meaning, a love which holds both beauty and sorrow. The sacramental attitude declares "This small act of kindness is my way of being part of a larger spirit of kindness.  Its significance is not in its size, but in what it connects me to."

There are two other responses that I want to mention here briefly, although I do not think of them, in their current versions, as having much creative or spiritual potential, but they are enormously popular. One is "they brought it on themselves," which gets repeated like a magical incantation to ward off the suffering of others. If that idea were true, then the suffering of others would be their own private comeuppance. The problem here is that we know at some level that the  "they brought it on themselves" idea is unreliable as a generalization and untrue much of the time, so no matter how much we repeat it, it does not really make us feel any better.  How can the three-year-old children of Laos today have "brought upon themselves" the unexploded bombs of the Vietnam war?

Another position I observe people taking in order to hold suffering at bay is, "it's all in my mind, so I can change it all by changing my mind." This transforms the world from a real, but scary, place into an unreal, and therefore safe, place.  The biggest problem I see in this attitude is that it turns everyone in the world into figments of my imagination.  I set myself free from the pain of other people and other creatures by mentally demolishing the world we share and the nearness we might share.  Infinite isolation and loneliness do not feel to me like good solutions to the problem of suffering. And also, some of the suffering in the world I may have had a hand in causing, and therefore need to have a hand in healing.   

Although there are all sorts of problems with these last two attitudes I have just described, I honor the deep pain that drives people toward them.  And these two attitudes may yet evolve and develop a compassionate depth which they now lack.

In each of the five responses described above, we see the double nature of our task.  We want to respond to the needs and emergencies that are part of life (even if we can't respond enough), and we also struggle to keep our personalities from unraveling along the way as we become witnesses to acts of monumental cruelty and stupidity (land mines, enchantment with nuclear weapons, artificially induced food shortages and starvation as a result of feeding corn to cars, etc.)

I think we are being challenged to evolve a new sort of personality, one I would call the "resilient boddhisattva," who acts out of a place of compassion and serenity, accepts that everything will pass away and yet acts to relieve suffering anyway.

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July 2010

QUESTION:

The New Oxford American dictionary defines theology as the study of the nature of God and religious belief.  Based on this definition of theology I am led to believe that liberation theologists believe in God.  If I am wrong in this belief please inform me otherwise. However, if liberation theologists do believe in God and the Holy Bible, could you explain to me with Scripture examples the means by which the oppressed and the oppressors receive his/her salvation?  Thanks for your time.
  

  
RESPONSE:

Thanks so much for writing to me. As you know, people have been arguing about the topic of of salvation for a long time. I can't speak for all the liberation theologians who have written thick books in the past fifty years, I can only speak for myself. (Although I think many liberation theologians would be sympathetic with my faith.)

As James Watkins documents in a wonderful article on this, at http://www.jameswatkins.com/faith.htm Jesus and the apostles approach the topic of salvation in a wide variety of ways. So I do not feel that there is only one right view of salvation. I seems to me that it is more like many spokes pointing toward a hub of light. People have different mind sets and need to be approached in different ways with different explanations, as you see in the story of Nicodemus struggling to understand what Jesus meant when He spoke of a person being "born again."

Somehow in my life I have been moved by Matthew 25. Jesus talks about the final judgment and the focus is on active caring. With an emphatic force that startles me every time I read it, and inspires me every time I pray on it, Jesus asserts that we will will be judged in heaven by how we treated "the least of these" here on earth. There is no mention here of accepting His blood as shed for the remission of my sins, of believing in the virginity of Mary, or that the communion wafer becomes the literal body of Christ, or any of the other things that people claiming to be Christians have burnt each other at the stake for over the centuries. Just "I was hungry and you fed me." I call this "the mysticism of kindness," because it is a vision of kindness as a direct communion with God.

The Catholic priests in Latin America who gave voice to liberation theology saw themselves as not simply caring for the poor, but rather, caring for Christ, the image of God in which each of those poor people had been created. They eventually could not tolerate being mere ceremonial appendages in societies that were crushing large parts of their own populations while lifting a few up to fabulous wealth. These priests were being asked to bow down to the God of Wealth, and like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego of old they would not bow down (and keep silent while their parishioners died). This is why so many died martyr's deaths. (Please see this site's page devoted to Archbishop Romero.)

I hope this gives you some of the flavor of liberation theologizing. My strand focuses on Jesus, but some of the most famous liberation theologizing focuses on the Exodus narrative and the symbolism of being led out of slavery. There are many forms. The book, "Liberation Theology," by Robert McAfee Brown is a well known and excellent introduction. (Large parts of this book are readable online.)

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Dennis Rivers,  Editor