[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] WHAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION THESE DAYS?

Fri Jul 6 13:08:00 PDT 2012

My thought was simply that one of "the questions" for me is , What's the moral issue of our time?  I do think there are a few key ones - no more than , say 5. I also think that this "we" is much larger, more diversified and less able to focus on a single moral issue.  

I'm sure the 99/1% is still the major moral issue we face.  I think it is a bit of an abstraction in itself, because the fact that is our reality encompasses a complex of other issues. It's like the apartment building of issues - lots of apartments in there.

I'd say without hesitation that the way we relate to the natural world and the natural resources of the planet is right up there as a moral issue.  If you're killing your life source and know it, that's just not right in any moral context. 

I don't know quite how to state this, but it seems to me that there are some heavy duty moral questions in the ways organizations are structured and function and the way authority operates. Billions of people with few opportunities for genuinely empowered participation and real collaboration. We spend 1/3 of our lives at work. I think there's a moral issue there. It gets a little lost in the 99/1% conversation, because that part of the conversation tends to focus on poverty. 

Bill P and Jim B are asking a question with a funny shape. It seems to us that there is a new paradigm going and the world is not catching on. I think the world has seen several things (9/11 - Al Gore’s powerpoint presentation - 2008 financial collapse etc.) that say we can't go back, but there are people and structures actively and, i think, knowingly denying those realities for all they are worth. 

I think that 'denial of reality' is one of the forms of escape from an existential question that may run something like, "How do we be human together - in this interconnected, interdependent world?"  

There are plenty of people and structures and systems that are heavily invested in living off the contradictions of the old paradigm. It's one of the sure signs of a dead world view when it generates more problems than solutions and those problems become food for intensifying the inherent contadictions.  Energy companies refuse to come to terms with the environmental crisis. The relationship between the West and the Islamic world is totally screwy. The way the banks operate is an aspect of the 99/1issue, but it is also an example of how defiance gets structured into the world as an operating modality - full-out, unvarnished Kirkegaardian style defiance at it's absolute best. Partisan politics has seriously devolved and is intentionally blocking anything remotely close to consensus on systemic solutions to serious social problems. It looks like defiance to me. We fog over the windshield and complain that we can't see.

This is all kind of a slightly formed thought, but maybe 'how to move forward together' is one of the key questions for us - whoever the 'we' might be and how we may each be positioned to address it.   

\\/

- - - - - - - - - - Wayne Nelson
wnelson at ica-associates.ca
O - 416-691-2316
M - 647-229-6910

On 07-062012, at 2:30 PM, R Williams wrote:

> Jim,
>  
> By "peace" I meant something more than the absence of war.  I suppose I meant something like "with civility," " with mutual respect," "acknowledging the dignity and worth of all."  This may be idealistic but without it I am skeptical that we can continue.  The by-product of this kind of peace is sustainability, so my statement may have been a bit redundant.
>  
> I agree with Wayne up to a point.  I believe there is really one moral issue at a time, but there must be many ways to describe it and  thus to articulate the question.  With the way issues are so inter-related, it's difficult to talk about one without eventually getting into  most of the others, and probably even more difficult to finally boil it down to "the" underlying root/moral issue of the time.  I would have to say that the way we articulated it in the 70's as the disparity between the 85/15, or today maybe the 99/1, isn't that far off base for today as well.
>  
> One thing I do feel fairly certain about.  Whereas in RS-1 days we asked, "Who am I?" "What do I?" and "How be I?"--today I would insist that the question, whatever it is, is not an "I" question, but rather a "we" question.
>  
> Randy
>  
> "Listen to what is emerging from yourself to the course of being in the world; not to be supported by it, but to bring it to reality as it desires."
> -Martin Buber (adapted)
> From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
> To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> 
> Sent: Friday, July 6, 2012 12:33 PM
> Subject: [Oe List ...] WHAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION THESE DAYS?
> 
> WHAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION THESE DAYS?
> 
> Over coffee, this morning, i recopied the emails from this thread and tried to narrow down to just the questions that were posed.
> 
> I think i missed an email that Lee Early was responding to in his message.
> 
> A couple of reflections:  
> 
> Randy, in yours, i was struggling with the phrase "in peace", wondering, a bit like the word "church" or "religious" what that might point to that would seem true to life vs. sort of an ideal future.
> 
> Wayne, your response that there may not be "a" question, but many and we each have to figure out our own for ourselves got me to reflecting on the evident complicatedness of things in a systemic or interconnected world.  My auto mechanic was explaining to me how to simply fix the health care system in the US, and your comment came up for me, and i said that is a good idea, but i think we are looking too often for simple silver bullet solutions when thngs are actually much more complicated.  And that made sense to both of us and moved the conversation on.
> 
> Jim Baumbach's question put me back on my heels . "How do I get you to change your mind and do what I think is right?"  then, when in linking it with Bill Parker's notion that none of this is new, and why haven't we all woken up? Got me thinking, at least on the liberal or progressive side, whether the new religion arising is the religion of human rights . . . Progressives, at least, seem to hold these as sacred and as a moral obligation to be enforced.
> 
> I could go on, but my eggs are getting cold, and the slice of cantelope from Judy's garden is calling.
> 
> THE GIST AS I SEE IT
> Mary Hampton:  Enough, all ready, its too good to miss and I am not ready to edit.  Good stuff, folks!
> 
> Ken Gilgren:  why am I here? What am I doing? How am I being?  What quickens the current action of my soul?
> what was the question again?
> 
> Wayne Nelson:  What are the pivotal moral issues of our moment?  I think there are likely to be several. Of course there are many, many but there are probably some major ones.  To reduce it to a single one makes it too abstract and denies the obvious complexity.  We all have to name 'the moral issue of our time.'  There's not likely to be one for everyone. It's a job we all have to do.
> 
> Bill Parker:  What are the warning signs of the destruction and endangerment of the entire human community?  Then ask, what is the underlying question to be addressed and how it can be addressed.  Why are people not being awakened to the clear, obvious truth of our crisis? Secondly, what methods must we develop or employ to radically reveal this all encompassing truth?
> 
> John Cock:  My take: If it does not have something like "on behalf of a transformed Earth community" in the statement,  it is the WRONG right question, moral issue, or vocation.
> 
> Lee Early:  "Who is Tiger Woods?", What is his mission?  Can we re-answer the second question?  Mission, social pioneer, church, college, league, crimson line and movement?  The answer to the question of mission will carry the first of who.  (At least here in the West.)  Sometimes the question of mission changes.  Sometimes by chance and sometimes on purpose.  What is our mission TODAY?
> 
> Randy Williams:  In reflecting on the dialogue around what is "the question," I realized we really were assuming two questions.  How may "we"  (all species) live together on this planet in peace, in a way that secures life for future generations?  What is the new face, form and mission of the "movement" (the religious, the invisible college, the church with a little"c," ) and what stories, style and symbols will sustain it?
> 
> Jan Sanders:  What are the key images of the future of evolution?
> 
> Steve Harrington:  You had to say it, eh?  What does it look like to be the Sensitive & Responsive. To what concerns? where?
> 
> Karen Bueno: "How do we motivate the sensitive and reponsive ones who understand that the survival of the people of the earth and the earth itself depends on our working together to make that survival possible?"  I like the idea of striving for a T-shirt phrase, like "Be one of those who dare to live the future now.", as someone suggested.
> 
> David Walters:  in the midst of a malaise of helplessness and an established / controlling economic and political elite, what can we do to support and help to form the emerging groups and movements (both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement) to be both effective and inclusive?
> 
> Jack Gilles:  Given the stance that "History rides on the back of the religious" that we embodied and lived..... "Who are the 'religious' today, where would you look to find them, what are the marks that tell you so, and what might we share (and how) with them so that they are empowered and connected?".  The "we" in the question should refer to "those of us who are scattered" and who will take seriously the answers.  
> 
> Janice Ulangca:  In this 50th year of EI/ICA, some of the questions to live with:  Considering what we were/are/might be, what is our calling?  What are we called to know/do/be?  What are some of the important partnerships the future needs?
> 
> Missed the name:  What was Neibhur's line? (and how do you spell his name?)  Something about the sensitive and something ones.
> 
> Nancy Lanphear:  What is " MY GREAT WORK (IS) WHERE MY OWN GREAT JOY INTERSECTS WITH EARTH'S GREAT NEED" ....perhaps EARTH could be stretched to all my relations, the universe, life ....
> 
> Jan and Steve:  Considering what we were/are/might be, what is our calling?  What are we called to know/do/be?  
> Jan:  What are some of the important partnerships the future needs?
> 
> Jim Baumbach:  "How do I get you to change your mind and do what I think is right?"
> 
> Karen Bueno:  "How are we to live together and preserve this planet for the future?"
> 
> 
> 
> Jim Wiegel
> Jfwiegel at yahoo.com
> 
> “One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” – Carl Jung
> 
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