Politics is such a wild bag. I feel like Obama has managed to attract a following from a large portion of the left center of the country’s mental landscape. And as someone who is being pretty damn successful at what he is trying to do he is criticized by people on either side. Republican/conservative criticism is expected. I am just a little surprised that there are people on the far left who dont like him. Ok I take that back, I am not surprised at all.The criticism that has surprised me on the left is a response to the expectation that some seem to have that Obama will save the country from the evil of George Bush, white privilege, and lobbyists. To me he seems like the most likely to make a real difference and to understand the importance of helping people without money. To me, it is important that he is an african american and I am amazed and thrilled and encouraged that he has made it so far into the presidential process. I did not think that I would see a black president in my lifetime. It means that our culture might not be as racist as I thought it was. Though race as been the forbidden issue to far in the election it means that Obama has probably had a different experience than the white majority currently in office. I have hope that he will have a more acute sense of how his actions as president affect those who are still the recipients of systematic oppression. maybe, just maybe, he can take some real action to dismantle some of these systems.Check this out if you have a minute, the author really did her research:I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)
Are the little things really enough?
Recently I participated in a church book study reading Brian McLaren’s “The Secret Message of Jesus.” Like good presbyterians we wondered with each other about what we can really do to change the world. Can the extreme-ness that McLaren talks about really make a difference? Is it realistic for any contemporary person to live that way; radically different than others around us?
Good questions, right? We by group process talked about doing the little things daily to make a difference in the world. But come on, really, does that do it? I can understand feeling helpless about all the wrongness in the world, I often feel the weight of it. The justification for only moderate goodness is that there are only so many Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings. There are people who have lived and died giving us great inspiration that people can be better to each other. But we think and say to ourselves that we can’t possibly do what they did (and that we don’t want to die like they did).
I think and feel that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one will see real change or be an effective advocate for anyone unless they are convicted that what they do and say is right and necessary. Also that if they dont act then no one will.
Doing the little things like wishing the bus driver a good day have an impact. A momentary and fleeting impact that may be important to that person in that moment but probably not much more. In the same way that putting out negative energy has an impact in the opposite direction. If anything, the two cancel each other out and the general trend in society continues to be the perpetuation of the lowest common denominator. The basest trend of humanity to care for themselves more than others wins out and continues to screw us slowing into oblivion.
We have to do better. I will do better if I can at all help it.
Kids with Drums
What can you really do for kids that live on the streets? Apparently giving them drums is a good start. Last week I volunteered at the “It Starts with You” art and performance show put on by homeless (and formerly homeless) youth on Chicago’s north side, organized by The Night Ministry. A lot of the kids were gay or transgender. For most of those, their sexuality was the reason why they could not stay at home. Most of them had had very intense things happen to them. Victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and neglect.This was one of the best pictures from the event but not the best. I am limited in what I can show because I dont want to risk treading on any toes. Some of these kids may not want to be found where they are.The DFCS side of me was in full alert that night. The kids who stay at those shelters have seen and experienced things that, in an ideal world, children should not have to deal with. Julie tells me that when children come to the shelters the workers who accept them have to forward their information on IL DCFS child abuse intake. Little is ever done. Very few cases are ever substantiated so no action is taken and few resources come down from the state for their support. Also, agencies are apparently not able to accept children on an overnight basis. So there are very few (if any) emergency and one night youth homeless shelters. The law says that they cant go to an adult one but the law does not provide an alternative. One of the girls at the performance read a poem about spending all night riding the El afraid that she would get beat or robbed or raped. Its not a friendly world out there if you are poor or gay or both.
Drab Day
What a drab day today. It is supposed to be dropping below freezing so that the rain starts freezing and then turns to snow later tonight. Today the weather said there was a high of 40 and a low of 5 with rain/ice/snow throughout.This week off I have had an extremely hard time focusing on much of anything. I sit around, I read rss news, I watch TV. Or i go to school and do endless organization on the photo computer. I forget that I want to read. I want to expand my mind and talents and make my time useful and valuable. So failing that I feel like I am not doing anything with myself and want a change. I wonder if I am confusing the short term reality with the long term feeling? It is true that school starts in a couple days and then the slow crunch will start.Along with my texts for classes I bought a web languages tutorial guide. I would like to learn some web design basics. I was pretty good at coding in high school. I didn’t get very sophisticated, basic and C++. It was one of those things that I felt that if I were to focus I could rock it out of the park, that and Calc. Not knowing Trig killed me in both of those. In the web world I will have some catching up to do if I want to be able to do much at all it seems. The last time I tried my hand at it, it was just HTML, nothing more. The book I got is HTML, CSS and XML. PHP and mySQL will be next.If I’m going to do anything on my own though I will need to improve my design sensibilities. I feel like that will help my photo eye as well. A mentor who really knows this shit would be great.
Why do you not hate poor people?
I went downtown today and had an interesting encounter with a homeless man. It was on the El almost to my stop. He came over and asked me what time it was. I told him and he acted surprised that I did not have “a negative reaction” to his question. I was a little surprised myself at this. I had only told him what the time was, not a big deal. He went on to ask me, apparently in all seriousness, why I didn’t hate poor people. The best response I had was that I could recognize that I was not all that far from being homeless myself. I had to say that as I was getting out of the train, as he came up to me as I was preparing to leave to get off for my stop. I had in mind that Julie had just gotten a job and the pile of jobs that we had been keeping were just barely enough to keep us from sinking too quickly. As a matter of fact, if she had not gotten the job we would have had a hard time paying rent at the end of this month. He didn’t know that and might have been a little confused at my response. I wished him a good day as I left.Thinking about it later I could come up with a hundred very good reasons why I don’t hate poor people. For starters I try not to hate anyone. I don’t think he had in mind open hatred, but only he and God know what he has experienced talking to white people in downtown Chicago. Jesus was homeless. I have worked with homeless people in my time at DFCS. It amazes me that one can hate another due to the lack of a certain resource.Why would he ask me that question? I can only guess that he has gotten hateful reactions from people. It is not hard to imagine. People walk around downtown Chicago seemingly with tunnel vision. They can see where they are going and not necessarily not much else. The walk is a fashion accessory more ubiquitous than an ipod. If its not an ipod then its a cell phone, or even a determined look. The message is clear; I am going somewhere and don’t try to stop me. From what little I know, homelessness is marked by a lack of that very thing, going somewhere. The people who ride busses and trains for warmth are not going anywhere. When one breaks the other’s relentless cadence of movement-with-purpose….hatred.I think there is also a reflection of themselves that people with money see in people without it. They see that two months out of work could land them in the same circumstance. They know that they have $10,000 in credit card debt (the American average) hanging over their heads that they cannot repay. I think that those who respond hatefully know that their purposeful walk is an illusion. That where they are going is not nearly so important as they appear to think it is and the intrusion of a real human being with a real human concern, like eating a meal or gaining a sense of control over their world by knowing the time, this is too much reality to handle. Sad that is not much reality at all. I don’t know what motivated that man to speak to me or to respond as he did. I didn’t stop my own purposeful walk to find out. Twenty minutes later I wish I had invited him to get a cup of coffee with me, its where I was headed anyway. I find it extremely ironic that in the city where human intersection is unavoidable due to sheer proximity people act like they are the only ones in town. The only ones with concerns and needs, the only ones worth being the motivation of a movement-with-purpose walk.
No place like home for the holidays…
I have been telling Julie that it is time to get back to our lives in Chicago. We have spent the past week and a half with our families. It has been a very good time. The the family houses we visit are very different. At hers it feels like we are always busy. there is a lot of family living near her and we feel like we should see as many of them as we can. She has some friends still in the area that we try to see as well. At my family’s place in Detroit other family members live 45 minutes away at the closest and there are not that many of them. Also the TV is always on. Actually right now i am enjoying one of the few times it has been allowed to rest in the off position.Each of our family visits is a very different experience. Ironically, I feel like Julie’s is a relaxing break. they live in the middle of a national forest (practically), don’t have wireless internet and don’t watch much TV. I like getting up at a reasonable time, having a simple breakfast and watch the morning TV shows there. I get along well with the family there and that is a giant perk.At my parents house each person has their own laptop computer and the house is full of wireless internet. We have the tendency to each be on our computer, computing and my dad has the TV on full blast with either MSNBC or Seinfeld on. I am easily distracted and it is very distracting. I feel like Julie does not like it there as much because I get sucked into my computer screen or the TV and do not give her my full attention. It will be interesting to see what happens when we get wireless internet in our place in Chicago. There are no plans for Cable though.All that said I want to get back to being productive. It is almost impossible for me to do this at home with wireless, cable TV and the warmest room in the house being the TV room. We are heading out today for a New Years party at a friend’s place. Then back home to Chi-town.
More than meets the eye
I think Christmas is my favorite holiday despite the heavy aura of commercialism that permeates it. It has recently pushed Easter out of the number one spot. I feel like I have not maintained the importance of Easter like I have at Christmas. I have not been home and seem to be less likely to travel for Easter. I have also stopped fasting for it, something I used to do every year, maybe its time to bring that back…Christmas. The traveling and visiting are not really why I like Christmas. I feel like many of the things that we talk about at Christmas, particularly in Church, really remind me of how I can have hope for the future. In fact it also reminds me why the Church is important in my life. This year I missed two out of four sundays in Advent (the four weeks before Christmas) and it feels like I am missing something.We have the unmistakable action of God taken for humanity. One of my favorite movies starts out with the “The beginning is a delicate time…” so it was and continues to be here. Christmas is essentially the Genesis (literally and metaphorically) of Christianity. But the beginning it is hard for us to just let it be what it is, it was hard for the Biblical writers as well. Each of the Four Gospels had their own twist on what it meant and the best way to tell the story. Matthew went so far as to reinterpret part of his own tradition by including part of Isaiah, and tweaking it to fit how he wanted to tell Jesus’ beginning. We have carried on this noble tradition in how we see Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the “wise men,” and even the barnyard animals imported and anthropomorphized by imagination. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with this at all as long as we recognize it for what it is; european imagination. For us who have been saturated with these images for years and years it puts a familiar and accessible face on a powerful and cross-cultural middle eastern story. For those who find it hard to connect with Christianity it very well might be reason to distance yourself from the ‘obviously fanciful’ tradition and mythology.For me, recognizing that there is a fair bit of embellishment in our nativity scenes and Christmas hymns, signals to me that I need to do the work myself to parse out the Gospel significance from the imagined mythology. God took decisive action for humanity in Jesus, placing in this world a human being with a connection to God of a quality that has never been seen before or since. He was able to reveal to us the identity of God in a way that was more personal and (Christians believe) powerful than what had been revealed in the law, prophets and writings.It is also an opportunity for us to celebrate Jesus and (mostly) avoid the direct jump to atonement and salvation from sins. There are those who do it of course, those who jump directly to the baby to the man crucified for the sins of the world, in sermon or song. For me that is just a little more guff to filter out. Another european (and American) embellishment to the story. Jesus can be crucified and saving us the rest of the year, for this couple weeks I am happy to see that our hope for a better world, for God’s Kingdom to be made real among real people, for peace and justice and love are not in vain.
Activism Reflections
The semester is finally done. I feel like I am coming out of a comma. The past couple weeks have been kinda difficult but not at all in the way I would have liked. I really don’t feel that seminary has been challenging to me in the way that I was hoping for. It may have been the combination of classes that I took. I feel like I was asked to do a lot of reflection and not much real scholarship. I suppose that could be due to McCormick’s emphasis on ordained ministry. The ironic part is that all the reflection on my call and understanding of the work and ministry of the Church in the world took the place of the few things that I was doing to actually do some of that work in the world. Both a startup Eco-stewardship group and my scant involvement with the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq both were put on hold when things got going. I found that I had to put down these things in order to get work done. I also found it hard to split my focus between schoolwork and activism. The first is a question of priorities. It is unfortunate that I have the choose between family, school and justice work. The second concern is a tendency that I feel needs to be overcome more by myself and my fellow seminary students. Talking to some of the more experienced students, including my graduated wife, it seems there is a lacking within the most recent class of the juice to do activism. Many of the groups that had been started in years past have faltered and disintegrated. Sometimes that needs to happen. Sometimes it is because participants do not care enough to keep it going. Different classes seem to have different cultures. The activist culture of McCormick was something that I felt last year and really liked. I guess I did not like it enough to dig in, get involved and keep it going.
Almost Done
Gotta keep going, almost done with the semester. Two papers, one big test. The end is in sight.
Interfaith
We visited the Sikh Gurdwara last night out in the suburbs. It was a very interesting mix of familiar and unfamiliar, but i suspect there was more unfamiliar hiding underneath what appeared to be familiar. I think that is where I am with interfaith work right now: the closer we look at things the more different they really appear to be.
I think prayer is a good example. Christians commonly pray to the Creator in the name of the Son through the Holy Spirit, yet (in most traditions) none of those are really considered a mediator. Muslims and Jews seem to pray direct to God. Hindus seem to pray to a variety of Gods. I dont know that Buddhist prayer is properly called prayer at all as they dont believe there is anyone beyond the individual to pray to. And Sikhs seem to pray to a God that is absolutely one and in everything, I am not sure how that fits in. Sure we all pray but that does not mean that even when we use similar words we are thinking the same things are happening.
I guess I am seeing that in order to have a real interfaith connection we need to be plainly honest about our differences. I could not tell you how many times I have heard the statement that the Prophet and Christ and Buddha and Hinduism and Guru Nanek all taught the same things. Well sure there are similarities but they did not teach the same thing. Some ideas of how to get along with other people are going to be similar or the same but that does not sum up those teachers’ teachings. I think for anyone to say that is (probably) an oversimplification of their own traditions teaching. In order for interfaith dialog to work we need to have a strong enough sense of self to be able to talk about real differences without feeling threatened by their existance.
ajdele
