April 2020 - OE - lists.wedgeblade.net

Final Meaning witness
by Richard Alton 04 Apr '20

04 Apr '20

I just found this piece going through my files: I was Louise Singleton and her late husband John's Local Church prior and later worked a decade with her on the ICA USA's African ICAs HIV/AIDS work. A little long for a witness but what happens to one who spends a month working on final meanings on the Southside of Chicago. Amazing what we asked of people! Dick THE GROUND SHIFTS UNDER MY FEET SOUTH HOUSE ON BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO I am not sure what I expected when John and I and three others from Montview Presbyterian Church drove to Chicago to attend the Summer Research Assembly at the Ecumenical Institute (EI). It was July, 1971; John and I left four children eleven to three in the care of the Denver Religious House at 1741 Gaylord Street, a big old house that was the home and office of those who worked for the Ecumenical Institute in Denver. John, Paul Hamilton and Don Elliott planned to return to Denver after a short time, but Freda, Don’s wife, and I intended to stay four weeks. I had never been to Chicago and my children would spend those four weeks in a Religious House. I knew essentially nothing about this organization or what I would be doing. What could I have been thinking? The Kent State Massacre had shocked the world on May 4, 1970. The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers in mid-June, 1971. Protests against the Viet Nam War were strident. I had missed the up-endedness of the 60’s – the rebellion against authority, free-form lifestyle, rejection of materialism, and discontented individualism. I had four children in the 60’s and to say that I was busy, distracted, and disconnected from the larger world is to understate the coziness of my cocoon. I ran into Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique in 1968 when I was pregnant with Will. I got a glimpse of how my wife and mother role had been meticulously nurtured into me in my Southern upbringing. Yes, I had gone to Boston to business school and happily worked for Polaroid for three years, but still I had no idea that I would want a career, work of my own in the world. I did not feel much responsibility for the world beyond my family and close community. John and I had encountered the Ecumenical Institute at a weekend seminar called RS-1 – Religious Studies I. Its intention was to confront unexamined religious literalism with an intellectual and experiential grounding that had powerful ramifications for how you lived your life. The course focused on four major symbols of the Christian faith – God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church. It used writings of four 20th century theologians, Rudolph Bultman, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and R. Richard Niebuhr to blow open these well worn church concepts and the words that name them, and ground them in ordinary human experience. It sought to demythologize them and re-symbolize them again. To me, who had grown up in the unquestioned and unquestioning environment of the southern Presbyterian Church, this was radical and exciting stuff. The calling was to live an intentional life of service – not to some reduced god, but to the whole world. This was not a Jesus Loves You, Y’all Come kind of theology; it was insistent demand. Stop worrying about yourself and your soul. Get out there and bring new life to the world. Live your life. I had no idea what a month in Chicago would bring; I was clear there was an interesting world beyond my kitchen sink, and my unexamined life role. We arrived in Chicago at the Ecumenical Institute offices located in an old seminary on West Congress Parkway in the middle of a poor black, angry, rioting community. We were instructed not go on the street – not because we might come to harm, but because there might be an incident which would damage EI’s work in 5th City, a community the Institute was working with to offer paths to change and a sense of hope where very little existed. The first shock was that those of us from Denver were split up and assigned to three different locations. A thousand people were expected to attend, so other buildings were co-opted. John and I were sent to a four story wooden building, an abandoned hotel with rooms around a central shaft on Blue Island Parkway. I have no idea where in Chicago it is because I only left the building to go to assemblies of the whole body once a week and I never walked outside the building. John was assigned to a men’s dorm and I was assigned to a women’s dorm on the 4th floor built around the four-story atrium. The building looked like a firetrap. My room containing bunk beds for six, opened on a hall at the top of this open shaft. I was out on the falling-off-the-wall back porch in tears because there was no way that a responsible mother of four would put herself in such danger. And I was beginning to understand about assignment: it equaled obedience. Charles Moore came along and asked what the problem was. I let him have it – the danger, the negligence, etc, etc. He listened quietly and said wait. In a few minutes he was back with a new room assignment. John and I were assigned together to a small room off the porch on the second floor above the kitchen. I learned later it was his and Pat’s room. Living in a room with five other women would not have been easy, but I might have been less lonely than returning every evening to this small room off the second floor porch, above the kitchen and facing the tenements behind. John stayed for a week and returned to Denver. I knew no one – no one to help make sense of the strange, continuously objectionable expectations in which the rules of engagement were different than any I had ever encountered. The Ecumenical Institute was a family secular order of people who had decided to live a life of radical service. Those who decided to join the Order Ecumenical lived by the ancient monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Poverty meant receiving a stipend equal to the poverty level wherever one worked. In India, that could be $10 a month. Some people worked outside and their income supported those who staffed the work of the Institute. Chastity had to do with the Kierkegaardian idea of willing one thing. Your life was about the immediate work and intention of the larger group. Obedience was about accepting assignment. These three disciplines – seriously observed – came to me continuously as a shock and an affront. And yet, all these extremely bright, well-organized, compelling people had agreed to live like this. And seemed to think it the most important thing they had every done. And the most important thing I might do. The task for the month was to create the New Social Vehicle. EI expected nothing less than to participate in transforming the world. Huge white banners hanging across the front of the assembly hall read, All the past belongs to all the people. All the wisdom belongs to all the people. All the goods belong to all the people. All the decisions belong to all the people. I wondered if this would show up in my FBI file although it seemed unlikely I had an FBI file. It had not been so long since the days of the McCarthy Hearings; I could believe association with this organization might be hazardous. I also felt an underlying implication that my usual role of wife and mother was inadequate: I needed to commit myself to renewing the local church and helping to re-create the institutions of society to care for all. The day began with Daily Office at 6 am. Wake up call was someone with a gong outside the door shouting Praise the Lord Christ is Risen, to which we were to respond, He is risen indeed as we rolled joyfully out of bed. I was assigned to a working group of about thirty people, which would be home base for the four weeks. We met morning and afternoon, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Research Assembly of a thousand people gathered staff from all over the country and a few from overseas, plus volunteers and new recruits like us. The purpose of the summer’s research was to figure out what was needed to transform civil society and create the practical programs that those under assignment would implement in the coming year to help bring that about. During the working year those under assignment would apply the thinking and programmatic actions wherever they were assigned, and come back the next summer for another assembly to assess what worked and create the organization’s work for the following year. It was a kind of practical research. It was an astounding operation, better seen from a bird’s eye view than from a hard chair in a working group in the steamy summer heat of Chicago. My bottom developed blisters. The task for that summer assembly was to define the dynamics that occur in any society. It would be used as a tool for understanding and analyzing what the tyrannizing and collapsing social forces were in current realities that need to be corrected. When economic, political, and cultural dynamics are in balance, the New Social Vehicle could emerge. Staff had read 1000 edge books over the last year, trying to discern what was happening in communities in the chaotic time of the ‘60’s and beginning of the ‘70’s. [image: page3image3330531104] Typical of ICA methodology, the task for the third of the assembly meeting at South House was to define the Cultural Commonality in The Social Process triangles. The other two locations would describe Economic and Political Commonalities. Those in south House were asked to figure out what concretely was meant and went on in Communal Wisdom, Communal Styles and Communal Symbols? My working group was assigned Final Meanings under Communal Wisdom. This task required a great deal of brainstorming, discussion, and corporate writing. It is difficult to explain and define the very medium in which you live and operate. As someone said, does a fish know what water is? Corporate writing was a new experience. Three or four people work together to write, getting their wisdom on paper in a process of suggestion and negotiation which can be both long and infuriatingly difficult, particularly if you are defining something called Final Meanings. The day’s work was sent to Room E where leadership decided what the next step would be the following day. This was an evolving process. I was totally disconnected from home, seeming to forget my children for days at a time; I was trying to survive and to contribute; my days were contained as if on an unknown island. There were no computers, cell phones, newspapers or even telephones for general use. Someone reported the news of the day at breakfast. There was a quiet time after lunch when I took my journal and incense to an assigned place and thought deep thoughts. Singing and Psalm conversations were intended to keep spirits up and intention focused on the task. There were regular reporting dynamics with a weekly assembly of the entire gathering and some planned activities or “discontinuity.” Singing by the whole body when they gathered 1000 strong in assembly was without accompaniment – and earthmoving. The primary songs I remember were the hymns For I Know Whom I have Believed, Amazing Grace, The Lord of the Dance, and Why O Lord, Hast Thou Quite Forsaken Me, Those Who Wait on the Lord, and secular songs like Blue Skies and I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do. People wrote visionary words to popular tunes such as On a Clear Day and the Sound of Silence. The nuts and bolts of the assembly were directed by staff and carried out by participants as assigned – to the kitchen, cleaning, print shop, and typing. John worked in the boiler room in the grungy basement. To load coal into the boiler, it was necessary to load it into a wheelbarrow and push the wheelbarrow up a six- inch plank to reach the boiler. One night on breakfast prep, I broke 300 eggs to prepare scrambled eggs. I was instructed to break them two at a time – one in each hand; breakfast prep was just beginning. Showers and toilet facilities were barely adequate and tended to verge on collapse. Documents were printed at the print shop and then collated by laying out stacks of each page in order and the entire body of people passed by in a line assembling their document – usually while singing. I anticipated that Bill Hudson, who had left the Order and was a minister at Montview Church, would arrive for the second two weeks. He had gotten me into this, and maybe he could help me understand why it was important for me to be there. I was in a school gymnasium as part of a typing crew on Friday night when the phone rang. I heard the person who answered say that it was too bad that someone had died. I found out that Bill had had a heart attack and died the day before. He would not be coming to Chicago, to South House. Bill had left the Order; people did not leave the Order. No one knew at that point how the Order should deal with an ex-Order member who died, so his death was mostly ignored: he had left the Order; he had refused to live his life. I am not overly given to tears, but I think that summer I cried about every day. I still do not know why I did not go home. I expect a few people thought up a good reason why they were required to be someplace else. My prior (as in the head of a monastery), the leader of my working group was that same Charles Moore who rescued us from the back porch. It is hard to describe Charles. Like many other people in the Order, he was a preacher who decided that this was a far more interesting and significant thing to do with his life than working in the desert of the local parish. He lived in the depth of the spirit – close to the Dark Night of the Soul. And he could make you believe you belonged there too. I could not imagine telling him this work was not important and I would not be part of it. That’s what a prior is: they keep you pointed in the direction you choose for your life, willing one thing and being obedient. I had chosen to be there. When Summer ’71 ended, Paul Hamilton’s son Cap, and I drove home from Chicago to Denver. We talked all night, and by the time we drove in I-70 out of Limon into the Denver morning, I understood a lot more about what had happened to me. I could think about it and not just respond emotionally. I would not just go home, pick up my abandoned children, and return to life as usual. I understood that I had now assumed Care for the World – a burden that would never leave me. I did not join the Order, although I often thought about it. I had a husband with little interest and four children. And I am not sure I could have been sufficiently obedient, willing-one-thing, and detached from this world’s goods to have been a satisfactory member of the Order. Research and working in local communities was also changing the organization. At the 1972 Summer Research Assembly, they emerged from the dark night of the soul and waltzed. I couldn’t believe the reports of what a fine time people had. The decision was also made to make the Turn to the World. The assessment was made that major change in our time would not happen through the local church, but through secular society. Soon after, the Ecumenical Institute became the Institute of Cultural Affairs, because major change in the world would come from change in the cultural dimension of society. Human Development Projects were born and established on every continent in every time zone where local people learned skills to “develop” their community – human devopment. As ICA worked in communities with every religion, the intent was not to convert people but to find the [image: page5image3331086800] ICA Meeting, Chicago transparent life-giving word in their religion. I particularly appreciated the EI/ICA intention to create and define frameworks to use in thinking about things. My favorite is Knowing/Doing/Being. Although I wrote many history exams on the economic, political, and cultural backgrounds of an issue, how those interacted with each other were not as clear until I worked with the Social Process Triangles. The Global Grid gives a new way to imagine the world. And of course, there is Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. Over the years, I volunteered in many activities, beckoned by the opportunity to work with unusually committed people who could see past the immediacy of the moment to the possibility of actually changing the world to one in which people – particularly the poorest of the poor--took hold of what they wanted for their future and worked to make that happen. The work opened my life to the world. John and I were part of a “cadre” at Montview Church, one of four churches in the Denver/Boulder area involved in the Local Church Experiment to renew our churches. We were instrumental in hiring Ken Barley who with Zoe had just left the Order, to replace Bill Hudson. He took the leadership role in changing Montview from a senior ministry model to a corporate ministry organization. In 1976, I assisted with town meetings in the nation-wide Town Meeting Project. It was a massive project--at least one was organized in every county across the country--as a way to raise the consciousness of residents to the possibility of new life in their community. In 1978, I visited development projects in India, Malaysia. and Indonesia while we were on sabbatical in Oxford, glimpsing first hand for the first time the enormity, richness, and need of the world. I helped organize local development projects in Colorado to attend the Global Exhibition of Development Projects in Bombay in 1984, and spent about four weeks there, helping to set up the conference, leading a group on a field trip to northern India, and traveling for a week after the conference ended. The Order: Ecumenical went out of existence in 1986 and the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) became a professional non-profit organization working with organizations and communities in the US and abroad. They developed, taught, and used facilitation and planning methods called the Technology of Participation or TOPTM. I joined the ICA Board in 1995, became president in 1998, and coordinator of the 2000 ICA International Conference held in Denver at Denver University, attended by 650 people, one-third of whom came from outside the US. Forty years ago, the Kemper Insurance Company sold their office building to ICA for $1.00. An eight-story building at North Sheridan Road and Lawrence Avenue, it is located in Uptown, north of Chicago downtown, between the commuter rail and Lake Michigan. Uptown is a low-income area with very diverse population. The Kemper Building became ICA: USA headquarters and a center for Uptown community services. There are ICA offices on the sixth floor, a conference center on the 7th floor and a community and guest rooms on the 8th floor. The rest of the building is leased to community service organizations including a health clinic, Chicago Social Services and various immigrant and other support services. On [image: page6image3331648272] Sunday music from African congregation services fill the 2nd floor. Particularly during the years I was on the Board, I was there frequently, staying in a guest room with the bathroom down the hall, eating meals in the dining room on the 6th floor and listening to the traffic and sirens that filled the night. I would fly into O’Hare, take the train to Jefferson and catch the Lawrence Avenue bus that stopped right on the corner of Sheridan. It was about a half hour ride through neighborhood after neighborhood, each a different nationality with its own ethnic flavor. That eye-opening ride was preparation for entering that building and the work that goes on there. For many ICA people, it is a place to return to, to see colleagues, work on project, maintain the archives, and touch base. It was a home I shared with many others. Over the last few years it is being turned into a green building modeling energy conservation and sustainability. In 2012 ICA participated in and was an organizing leader in Chicago’s Accelerate 77, which stands for Accelerating Green Initiatives in Chicago's 77 Community Areas. The building also has a new name: GreenRise Building Uptown. At the ICA International Conference in Denver in 2000, called the Millennium Connection, there was concern about the threat of HIV/AIDS to development in Africa. African staff were overwhelmed by their experience of HIV. People were dying and AIDS was decimating communities. At that time, the HIV rate in Zimbabwe was 26% and 16.2% in Zambia. Every family had at least one person sick and dying. In 2001, I joined several colleagues to develop and implement the African HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative. That work called on everything I had learned in public health and years of ICA and life experience. I had the opportunity to work with committed colleagues in the US, Canada, and the UK, but most importantly I worked in Africa with African staff and on the ground with rural villagers. I experienced the great pleasure of working with colleagues in a common and significant enterprise. What had often seemed like living my life in parallel universes finally came together. In the previous thirty years, I had many friends and colleagues in Denver who knew of and worked with ICA. Denver had had a Religious House with ICA staff and many in Montview Church were active or aware of ICA. But most people in my day-to-day life were not involved. I often felt ICA was too strange to be understood by my “normal” establishment friends and family. If you hadn’t been there, how would it make sense? ICA always claimed that it was not dis-establishment but trans-establishment – between the no longer and the not yet. I felt my experience was far outside that of most people, hard to explain, and hard for friends and family to grasp. The ICA African HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative was something everyone could understand and support. Without funding of Denver friends, Montview Church, and the sponsorship of funds from several Denver and Boulder Rotary Clubs, we would have had a difficult time launching the Initiative in eight countries in Africa. Working in eight countries was possible only because [image: page7image3332124816] of the network of self-governing country ICA’s with local staff trained to lead Human Development Projects since the early 70’s. They were local community revolutionaries in their countries. Assisting those staff to address HIV prevention and management, as an integral part of their development work was our goal. This would become my work for the next decade and beyond. ICA as an organization is working as a professional non-profit organization in an establishment world and it is not easy. It has not yet learned to be a reliable beneficiary of funding organizations. The commitment of those from the next generation is needed to continue vigorous work as those involved since the ‘70’s retire and die. It is difficult to inspire young people to take up poverty, chastity and obedience – but I know from experience that that is what will be required to move to the New Social Vehicle, which seems less attainable and more essential with every newspaper report. 2012 was the 50th anniversary of this organization. Using the social process triangles, it is clear that the economic process is the tyrannizing force with the political as ally. The cultural dimension is collapsed, divided into sides, each unwilling to even talk about common values – those final meanings. The Occupy Movement had a glimpse of this, but did not know how to build that new social vehicle. It is the task for the next twenty years to figure out how to live in community that has changed radically at every level—local, national and global--since 1971, but still seeks the same human benefits. I am one of the people who want to make that happen. The blessings upon my life by my work, my colleagues, and association with this remarkable organization – this global home – have been beyond measure. Written as part of a memoir, Between Earth and Sky, self-published in 2015 ICA Global Citizen –1987 -- Richard H. T. Alton One Earth Film Fest ( OEFF) Green Community Connections Interfaith Green Network T: 773.344.7172 richard.alton(a)gmail.com **Save the Date! One Earth Film Festival 2021, March * http:www.oneearthfilmfestival.org Make Plain the Vision, Habakkuh 2:2 Won't you be my neighbor?

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ICA Archives Spring Virtual Sojourn 2020
by Lynda C 03 Apr '20

03 Apr '20

Colleagues In this time of social isolation, the Spring Sojourn 2020 will be a virtual event. See attachment. More details will follow soon. Hold the dates open to join us during the May 10-14 time frame. Praying for caring, healing structures all around the world. the Archives Advisory Team ICA Global Social Research Center

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4/02/20: Progressing Spirit: Jacqueline J. Lewis: A Grown-Up God for Times Like TheseSpong revisited
by Ellie Stock 02 Apr '20

02 Apr '20

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.yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateHeader .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateBody .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateBody .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateFooter .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateFooter .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A Grown-Up God for Times Like These | | | | | | | | | | Essay by The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD April 2, 2020 I had just graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and was serving a church in Trenton, a new church development called Imani Community Church. We were Presbyterians, hoping to grow a new kind of ministry — multiracial, intergenerational, children and elders co-leading, open and affirming, in an old building, in a dying city. It was rough. The industry that lead to the slogan, “Trenton takes; the world makes” had long dried up; business now meant government, drug-trade, policing the same, and houses of worship offering hope. We banded together across faiths against the perils of poverty, crime and, occasionally, deadly policing. Our allies were unlikely: Catholics, United Methodists, Baptists, Jews, The Nation of Islam and a splinter group, The Five Percenters. We did not agree on names for God, on how many times to pray, on how genders relate, on how to worship. We did agree that Trenton was our home and we needed to protect our home; we agreed that we were family. Before that time, I had an intellectual appreciation for other faiths. In my childhood church our junior choir sang, Millions of stars placed in the sky by one God; millions of men lift of their eyes to one God…. walk with me brother there were no strangers after his work was done, for your God and my God are One. My parents never criticized Muslims or Jews; they were our sisters and brothers — all progeny of Abraham and Sarah. When I was a teenager, I had the understanding that Jesus himself was a Jew and was deeply confused about how anti-Semitism could be in the heart of any Christian. And in seminary, I studied the core principles of many faiths. But it was in the working side-by-side with colleagues across faiths that my personal faith became universalist. I was a Christian; I am a Christian. But it became clear to me that God speaks more than one language. Because God wants to be known, I came to believe, by any means necessary, God speaks to the hearts of humans in the ways they can hear, inviting us to come close to be seen, known and loved. When I left Trenton to go to graduate school to study psychology and religion, my interfaith family came to celebrate me and our shared work. They came to send off an African American Christian woman. They embraced me as their sister, some breaking cultural boundaries to do so. It was at Drew University in the psychology and religion program that I began to think more deeply about how humans come to faith, how faith sustains us, how the “God story” is one narrative that shapes our personalities. I am sure some in my discipline move in the world with certainty that God is an illusion, created (per Freud) to manage our anxieties about life and death. For me, I strongly believe in the existence of God. AND because God is a mystery, theologians, ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and every day folk have spent lifetimes trying to understand God. Who is God? What does God require of us? What is the relationship between God and the nature of goodness and evil? Does God cause natural disasters; why doesn’t God stop natural disasters? We wrestle with those questions as soon as the concept of God enters our awareness. One of my favorite psychologists of religion, Ana-Maria Rizzuto wrote, “No child arrives at the 'house of God' without his pet God under his arm.” (Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study). She means that each of us has a God representation. Rizutto argues that there are parts of our God representation that are made up of what we have experienced. I agree and would say further that those experiences are often imbedded in stories. Stories shape our psychological development — stories about gender, birth order, sexuality, race, and, yes, about God/religion/faith. We learn stories about God (theology) from other people who ask the same questions as we do. Our church school teachers, pastors, imams, rabbis — are all wrestling with the mystery. They wrestle using personal experience, research and study. They wrestle while reading the “wrestling” of others — commentaries, midrash, even other sermons. They wrestle using scripture and other holy texts, which, although inspired, represent the theological wrestling of the writer! The authors of those texts have stories, experiences, and circumstances that make them wonder, “Where is God in this? How am I to understand this in light of what I think about God?” Because the authors are different, because the circumstances are different, what they say about the “unchanging God” varies. In fact, most scholars believe there are four different theological voices in the Hebrew scriptures as they show up in the Christian bible. And, when we read the four gospels telling the story of Jesus, we get four different nuanced narratives as well. It can feel that God is changing, but actually I think it is different than that. The way I think about this is that we project different things onto God at different times. Sometimes we want and need to think of God as a kind and benevolent being, who will forgive all things and bless us, no matter what. Sometimes we want to think of God as a powerful, angry force who is fully in charge of the universe and who will, if we ask, smite the people we call enemies. I think we often “create” the God we need for the moment. Father Richard Rohr writes, Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around. ― Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that God doesn’t change; we do. We change individually, developmentally; the human species also evolves. Our understanding of the mystery of God changes as we mature, as we have new experiences. We speak, sing, write, read texts, and preach about our changing understanding of the mysterious, ineffable God. What we say, think and write is only a representation of the indescribable. Our pronouns for God might change (I now love “she” and “they”). Our metaphors for God might change, mine has become more intimate. Rather than “rock” or “shelter,” I think more often of God as “partner” or “bosom to rest in.” Just like God shows up in holy texts, God shows up on television, in film and in art as a representations as well. When describing God in The Color Purple, Alice Walker put these words in the mouth of a wild and wise woman, Shug Avery: Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you are looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like sh&t. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it. The older I get, the longer I live, I, too, think God is everywhere, in everything, all around us. Inside all the people, in our new grandson and his two-year old sister. In the doctors and nurses working, right now, to heal people of viruses, and of broken legs. The therapists and clergy working to heal people of broken hearts and broken hope. In the rocks, rivers and trees; in the rise and fall of an ocean, in the rise and fall of our breathing bodies. God shows up in our lives, as part of our lives. And when I need a short-cut to describe the mystery, the Holy Other that is both outside of us and inside of us, I go to a little book in the Christian New Testament, 1 John 16: God is Love, and those who abide in Love abide in God, and God abides in them. All who love live in God, and God lives in them. That is so comforting to me. It opens my heart up, makes me less judgmental, and more curious. I believe God is Love. There have to be many paths to Love. Love. Period. Love is a grown-up God for a grown-up life. A grown-up God for times like these. ~ The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD Read online here About the Author Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD is the Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. She is a nationally acclaimed activist, author, public theologian, and organizer of an anti-racist multicultural movement of love and justice. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on The Today Show, CBS, and MSNBC. She write The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multiracial and Multicultural Communities, and also wrote a book with her husband John called The Pentecost Paradigm: Ten Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader Why is it so difficult to apologize? Why do some apologies heal while others fail - and even offend? A: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Reader, One of the most healing and humble exchanges between two people is an apology. Saying, “I’m sorry!” can restore feelings of safety, dignity, and respect. Because it is a sign of strength, the words can even repair relationships, especially when based on the concept of restorative justice. However, not all apologies are the same or have any meaning behind them. For example, Hollywood film mogul, Harvey Weinstein, was recently convicted of sexually harassing, assaulting, and raping dozens of women. Weinstein’s public and scripted mea culpa stated the following: “I so respect all women and regret what happened.” Weinstein’s apology is the classic conditional non-apology. It means the following: If you are hurt, I am sorry. Or, stated another way: I am sorry only if you are hurt. In my hometown, members of the Cambridge School Committee, along with many students of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School - past and present - their parents, and the wider Cambridge community have been embroiled over School Committee member's use of the n-word. Many have requested her resignation as a beginning step toward restorative justice. On the surface, an apology should have extinguished the imbroglio. However, sometimes an apology inflames rather than informs, and mends the situation toward healing. The School Committee member’s apology was experienced by many as insensitive and tone-deaf, at best, and, as racist, at worst. Her apology exacerbated fraught racial tensions; thus, creating another missed opportunity toward restorative justice. Also, given the uneven power dynamics and racial hierarchy between the School Committee member and the students, she, as an educator, missed another teaching moment to model what to do when an apology is needed. Apologizing doesn’t always mean that you’re wrong, but instead, you value a relationship with the injured party more than trying to prove a point or delving into the minutia that inevitably compounds the chaos, confusion, miscommunication, and hurt feels. Restorative justice creates relational strategies to remedy racial disparities, institutional and implicit biases, and hurt feelings when it can build from an effective apology. However, ineffective apologies make restorative justice impossible because they intentionally change the topic, minimize the blame, and most egregiously wait too long to be sincere or sufficient. We all have experienced these types of ineffective apologies when someone does the following: apologize to be polite; apologize to appease; apologize on demand; apologize from guilt, and apologize without apologizing. These apologies fail to recognize an offense, the aggrieved parties, and to lay a foundation toward reconciliation. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Church and the Flu Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong February 8, 2006 Dear Friends, This week I introduce you to the first guest columnist of this year 2006. Each year I try to identify four unique voices of those who labor in the same area of life that I find myself working. They are people who either have thought about things in a new way or even those who have thought about new things. I take great pleasure in making these voices better known. Today I present to you a piece that in my knowledge no one else has addressed. It was authored by one of the most gifted clergy in this generation. The Rev. Dr. Phillip Cato may be the most intellectually stimulating priest from my own church that I have ever known. Raised, as I was, in Charlotte, North Carolina, he did his undergraduate work at Duke University, got his Master's in Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then after some time serving congregations mostly in North Carolina, he pursued and received his PhD degree from Emory University in Atlanta. His field of study was "The Intellectual History of the Western World." That broad and all-inclusive subject has always intrigued me just as Phillip's mind has done. In addition to serving churches Dr. Cato also had a career as a chaplain in the United States Naval Reserve I had the pleasure of being Dr. Cato's bishop for a number of years and his incisive intellect made a profound difference to me and to our diocese. He is now retired, but in his retirement he is active in both the congregations and the intellectual life of the Diocese of Washington, D.C. Most people in this church of ours would not think about the subjects Phillip addresses but, typical of his career, Phillip has never been left at the starting gate. He is generally far ahead of most of us. Several weeks ago, the New York Times reported the one-day drop of over 25% in the price of Pilgrim Pride Corporation Class B stock that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The story accompanying this slide revealed that this Company, located in Texas, is the second largest poultry business in America, topped only by Tyson's Foods of Arkansas. The collapse of the stock price in Pilgrim Pride Corp. was attributed to softness in the sale of chicken in the European market, causing Pilgrim Pride to lower its guidance for the next quarter. The drop in demand was attributed to the public's move away from chicken in the light of the Avian or "bird flu" scare. On January 11, a CNBC program talked about the need for American business to prepare for the possibility of a "bird flu" pandemic. No one I know of in the Christian Church has begun to address the state of preparation inside our churches for such an eventuality. Then along came Phillip Cato and, typical of his whole career, he was on top of this neglected issue. I welcome your responses pro and con, to this article, as I do with all of our guest columnists. I hope you will have suggestions about how the churches can operate if public gatherings are forbidden in an epidemic, or if receiving communion becomes too dangerous as a way of passing on the infection. If the volume justifies it I will print a sampling of your letters in a future column. I will also pass on all letters you write on this subject to Dr. Cato. The Church and the Flu Americans seem not to be much aware that we are facing a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions and are woefully unprepared to deal with it. The October 8th New York Times carries a chilling account of our nation's present unpreparedness to deal with an expected pandemic of avian flu. Gardner Harris provides a very detailed preview of the Bush administration's 381 page Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan to deal with what he characterizes as "what could become the worst disaster in the nation's history." The numbers cited by the government's plan, prepared "for internal Health and Human Services use only," are that more than 1.9 million Americans would die and an additional 8.5 million would require hospitalization costing in excess of $450 billion. The quarantines that are planned would, at best, only serve as a delaying tactic. Our recent national experience with the hurricane disasters in the Gulf States gives us no reason to be confident that our government has the capacity to deal with such a pandemic with any degree of efficiency or efficacy. The recent photo opportunity of the President with the chief executive officers of the major pharmaceutical companies does little to still what should be real fears about the consequences of this expected outbreak. Simply hoping that this virus will not evolve into one that has a human-to- human transmission capability is a dangerous expression of naivet ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements In this Special Edition of their Weekly Recap Newsletter, ProgressiveChristianity.org is highlighting Resources, Sermons, Online Tools and Courses to help all of us during this time of crisis. Click here to read the full newsletter. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Easter Sunrise Service Liturgy
by Ellie Stock 01 Apr '20

01 Apr '20

Dear Family, As we move, in the Christian tradition, from Lent into Holy Week, which the whole world is now experiencing in the midst of the detachment, suffering and death caused by the coronavirus pandemic crisis, we have the benefit of also looking toward what we now experience as Easter, the possibility of new life and transformation which the early followers of Jesus could not have anticipated, following the crucifixion. These last weeks, like many of you, we have been worshipping at home via live-streaming services. For many years, I have coordinated the outdoor Easter Sunrise Service on the west bank of the January-Wabash Lake, sponsored by the Ferguson Ministries Alliance. This year the service will not be held. Wherever we have lived, the Easter Sunrise Service (when it has been held outdoors, as this one is) has always been my favorite, but this year, with everything else changing, so has the way we will do this service. The service has always been informal--no robes, microphones, hymnbooks--just gathered together (standing or sitting in portable chairs) in a sort of semi circle, facing the lake, the fountain, the sunrise, and enjoying the sights and sounds of spring's creation, including the flyover or swimming geese with their bellowing honks. The service was held there rain or shine or snow, cold or warm with umbrellas or hats and gloves or no coats at all. Always a joy-filled occasion. Coffee and donuts followed. Then folks went home or off to their various congregations, breakfasts and Easter egg hunts. Attached is a copy of the liturgy for this year. Feel free to use it at home and share with others--best to be outside. As the words on the final blessing say: May the ChristWord, Event, Spirit, and Love--which cannot be bound by cross or tomb,social-distanced, self-isolated,sheltered-in-place,sequestered or quarantined--dwell within you andunite your heart withall humanity and all creation in renewed consciousness, care, courage,creativity, and compassion. Be well, stay safe, stay calm, and stay connected as we take all necessary precautions and remain physically-distanced and sheltered-in-place but Together in Spirit. Grace and peace,Easter blessings and love ~Ellie Stock :)elliestock@aol.com

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Memorial for John Gibson
by Lynda C 01 Apr '20

01 Apr '20

Dear Colleagues, Several folks have inquired about John’s obituary. I have had a message from Ruth Gibson Clark to share with you that the Memorial Service for her father, John Gibson, is tentatively set for June 6, 2020. The family will release the obituary as the memorial date is confirmed. Ruth’s contact is 5756 Carvel Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46220. E-mail: RuthandDave2004(a)gmail.com<mailto:RuthandDave2004@gmail.com>. With care, Lynda Cock.

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