All we need is love?

Glenn Beck is coming to Anchorage this Saturday, September 11.  Our former governor, Sarah Palin, will join him.  The event’s promoter says that the date is a coincidence.

In 2008, when then-governor Palin was the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, progressives in Alaska coalesced in ways they’d rarely done before.  One Saturday, almost exactly two years ago, I went to my first-ever protest.  I parked behind the ACS office building, and walked toward the library, wondering how many others had decided to show up.  I turned the corner, and stopped in my tracks.  The crowd was huge (by AK standards).

With Glenn Beck’s appearance less than a week away, I started hearing rumbles from Anchorage progressives.  ”Should we do something?”  ”Gather at the Park Strip at 11.”

But the tone is different this time.  Weary.  A sense of obligation, not passion.

And after those first, faltering proposals, there has been something new.  People say they want to do something positive.  People want to sing, and dance, and pray, and love.

I don’t know what the practicalities of this would look like.  But I do know one of the first steps, at least for me.  Ironically, it was inspired by Glenn Beck.

My first step is to learn more about the work  of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here are a few of his words.  May they kindle a fire of love in your heart.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Which one is it, Brawny?

If you’ve been following the story about the Koch brothers bankrolling the Tea Party, you probably know that Brawny paper towels are made by Georgia Pacific, which is owned by Koch Industries.

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article says this about the Koch brothers:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.

This morning before church I caught an ad for Brawny paper towels on TV.  The music for the ad?  ”Lean on Me.”  As in, “Lean on me, when you’re not strong.”  Are the Koch brothers volunteering their personal fortune as a substitute for government-provided social services?

Follow the Water: Immigration & the Colorado River

I like that the UU General Assembly’s choice to study immigration has provided a kind of filter through which I’m hearing the news.  Today on NPR’s Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal spoke with photojournalist Brian Frank about his journey along the Colorado River.  Here’s Kai’s intro to the segment:

The Colorado River flows from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado down through Utah and Arizona, along the border with California to the Gulf of California in Mexico. Flow might be too generous, actually. Because we use so much of the Colorado’s water in the American Southwest for both irrigation and development, what used to be a river is actually just a trickle by the time it crosses the Mexican border. Some years, it never even reaches the sea.

It feels to me like I’m engaged in a layer-by-layer unfolding of the issue of immigration.  It’s not as simple as “you didn’t come here legally so we’re sending you back.”

There are other things to consider.  Winona LaDuke’s Ware Lecture, coming on the heels of the decision to study immigration, reminded me to think about the issue in the context of how Europeans came to the United States.  How can we complain about people coming here illegally, I asked myself, when so much about the way “we” came to “own” this land was immoral?

This story about the Colorado River also prompts a question.  What moral high ground do we have to refuse to allow people to follow the water that we have stolen?  The answer, for me, is none whatsoever.

It’s easy to be so busy being self-righteous about other people not obeying little rules that we lose sight of our own transgressions.

Jesus had something to say about this:

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

What Makes Us Come Alive

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”   —Howard Thurman

The romantic in me likes to think that if we all do the work we love, and each of us takes a turn at the work no one loves, then everything will get done in a fair and equitable manner.  The realist in me says that’s easier said than done, and perhaps not even possible.

In the past month, I’ve taken some big steps in the journey of returning to parish ministry, “the work I love.”   My candidacy paperwork is in order, and I will be meeting with the WRSCC in San Francisco in October.  After a long period of vocational despair, it feels good to have an achievable goal in sight.

During my time away from parish ministry, I’ve had some jobs that did not make me “come alive.”  In fact, they stole life from me. When I visited the Center for Ministry career assessment people in Seattle, they said that working at an administrative job was stealing my joy, and that I needed to find some other form of employment.

Since we moved to Girdwood, it’s been my “job” to be the homemaker–I shop for groceries, walk the dog, take care of the laundry, make dinner, clean the condo.  Some of those things I enjoy, and some I don’t.  I like to cook; I don’t like to clean the kitchen.  I like to shop for groceries; I don’t care for lugging them home and putting them away.  I don’t like any of the housecleaning chores, and I’m not particularly good at keeping on top of them.

My life right now gives me time to write, to read (both for fun and for the MFC), to volunteer at the Anchorage UU Fellowship, and to make progress on my return to parish ministry.  I’m very lucky, because vocation is an option.  So many people are trapped in “work,” without hope of ever having the luxury of listening to the inner voice that says, “This is what you were meant to do.”

And the world as we know it depends on them remaining trapped.  It depends on secretaries and waitresses and migrant farm workers and people who stand in an assembly line dismantling chickens.  It depends on contract workers doing time in cubicles.  It depends on people who work on deep-sea oil rigs that just might explode.  It depends on coal miners who might get stuck, forever, underground.

Those of us lucky enough to be free have a deep obligation to those trapped in the deadening mechanisms of our greedy, growth-hungry consumer society.  We have an obligation to get our hands dirty in the hard work of changing the world.

I think we do need to ask what the world needs.  The world needs those of us who are free and (relatively) well-off to use our freedom and our resources in the service of change.  And if we do so, I believe we will discover ourselves coming alive.

Social Witness at General Assembly

I didn’t know what to expect from General Assembly.  I read through all the delegate materials, but they were just words on a page.  My imagination tried to create a picture of what I would encounter in Minneapolis, but came up short.

I knew there would be workshops. And there were.  And they were pretty much as I imagined.

But the business of the assembly, the things I would be voting on as a delegate, seemed to focus on statement-making, something different from what I remembered from my days among the Presbyterians.  What is the point, I wondered, of all of us coming such a distance, at such expense, to agree upon a bunch of nice words?

For much of my time at GA, I felt like I was swimming in social justice alphabet soup.  AIW, SOC and CSAI swirled together in my mind and I wasn’t really clear what we were doing.  But at least the words were coming alive, and the concepts were becoming clearer in my mind.

Like some of the other first-time attendees and delegates, by the end of General Assembly I was still unsure of our process, and the rationale behind it.  I’m still thinking about the work we did, still trying to understand why we did it.

Here’s some info from the UUA’s website talking about the social witness process, and the rationale behind it:

The Fifth Principle of Unitarian Universalism affirms and promotes the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process. In keeping with this, the way in which our denomination arrives at consensus on various social issues is by a democratically agreed upon process called the Social Witness Process, named as such because we bear witness to social inequity.

The Social Witness Process is facilitated by the Commission on Social Witness. It currently generates two types of consensus statements, Statements of Conscience, which result from study and action on a selected issue, and Actions of Immediate Witness. For more information, see the Social Witness Process page.

After much debate, the 2010 General Assembly voted to adopt “Immigration as a Moral Issue” as a Congregational Study Action.  I believe that this means that member congregations of the UUA will be encouraged to study this issue over the next four years, and a Statement of Conscience may emerge from that work.

I’ve been thinking about immigration since General Assembly, and will write more about that later.  In the meantime, enjoy this interesting commentary from the new PBS show Need to Know.