Month: August 2020

Scene: Garden of Gethsemane.
Time: Jesus having prayed multiple times, and 11 disciples roused from sleep.
Context: Judas and arriving crowd

Jesus says to the disciples, “Rise! Let’s go. The one handing me over has arrived.”

Attentive listeners may remember back to Mark, Chapter 1. Jesus has held a healing party hosted by the unnamed mother-in-law of Peter. After the party, the disciples fall asleep and, upon rising, seek out a missing Jesus.

Jesus, found at prayer and implored to go back to Capernaum, says, “Let’s go.” He clarifies that means to travel on to next cities for his Galilean task is to mutter about and model a different authority base for human politicking.

What is less clear in the Jerusalem moment is whether “Let’s go,” is away from Judas (back to the road beyond Galilee) or toward a different destination (finding a way back to Galilee through the leadership of Judas and the decisions of Caiaphas and Pilate – the practical effect of death and resurrection).

The relatively straight-forward direction, “Let’s go,” is far more ambivalent than our tendency to have it only be a call to action—like riding off in all directions at once.

At first, it means, “Let’s go further.” In the end, it means, “Let’s go deeper.”

This distinction can also apply to our current life-stage or state-of-current-affairs.

What does it means to go further than where we’ve come to?
What does it mean to go deeper into the place we are?

Both questions are important. Even more important is which is claiming more of our attention.

Both questions have personal and larger-community/creation components. Both questions dance the other’s response. We don’t go further without first going deeper, and deeper is not open to us without being stretched further. Enjoy and commit to where you are on the dance floor, knowing you’ll soon be changing partners.

never never
do we know
where meaning
is invested
where we
in turn
will be
called planted
to transform
elements to energy
energy to element
finding larger
heritage horizons
older than DNA
to track
our track
and larger
dream times
newer than new
pointing beyond
false limits
without knowing
good from evil
only within
without taking
for granted
never knowing
always called
always calling
settle enough

Today saw progress in a book publishing project. I’ve been working with Julie Todd to revise and print her Ph.D. dissertation. The title will be Struggling with (Non)violence. The strength of the book is its base of interviews with 12 scholar-activists about their experience with movements intended to redeem people facing direct, structural, and cultural violence. 

I look forward to announcing the book’s availability before the end of the month.

I usually treat myself to a new fountain pen at the end of a major project such as this one. After much deliberation, it came down to two pens calling me to choose them. With much hemming and hawing, I decided on a wine-red President from my usual Japanese pen company, Platinum. The best price was by a reputable eBay seller who had several. Last week I noted they were down to one and so I ordered it ahead of project completion. The dealer was in Japan, and they advertised the pen would arrive by September 3. That was after the expected book release days, so I ordered it on Wednesday of last week. 

The next day I received a notice that delivery was expected in only two weeks, instead of a month.

The next day after that, Friday, I received an email that indicated the pen would be delivered by the end of that day.

In 48 hours, I went from a vague sense a desired pen would arrive in a leisurely time, appropriate to the completion of the book project, to now writing with the pen inked with Monteverde Napa Burgundy.

Pandemics upset social relationships. Current federal politics upset social contracts. Jet travel upsets personal timelines.

Now it is time to double down on slow breathing and support of social movements that include rather than exclude. If a pen can arrive in Wisconsin from Japan in 2 days, we can provide basic care for people!

room by room
a mind’s archive
is searched

in vain it seems
that niggling bit
has hidden well

in the end
the search ends
we look around

what a treasure
has accumulated
without an accounting

rooms float by
entering us
not us them

we note motes
of dusty memory
and smile

when from nowhere
to our wandering eye
appears our bit

bigger than life
yearning for us
as we for it

together again
we dance
a puzzle together

Of course, the course of human events is uneven. Simply consider the course of any life, yours, for example, or mine. Review any picture from your babyhood, youth, or adolescence. What was their top joy? Their greatest fear? What were they learning that they never were able to articulate?

The distance between then and now is significant. In most ways, there is no bridging it. Then is still then – as implacably as now is still now. It is not that linkages are missing, but the fullness of the context and the limit of apprehending it.

What it meant, once upon a time, to establish a “common defense” alongside a “general welfare” has unraveled. Who were we when “man” meant all people? In an inflated context, with a restricted ability to engage it, we thought our rebalanced revolution would survive its time—that language would not change; that denotation would forever carry the same order of connotation we found so obvious.

Today we can no more even see the printed tension holding defense and welfare in an ongoing marriage dance than we can intuit a day in the life of our 6-year-old ancestor.

In terms of the words, our blindness comes not at the level of “defense” and “welfare.” We know them both in their individuality but not in their relationship to one another. Today they stand in opposition to one another. This distancing is not something inherent in them but because their descriptors have been left behind.

“Common” defense has become a defense of capital and those who have the most of it. “General” no longer speaks of interdependence between all the different gifts people hold, but the independence of what is best for me. What is best for others is received as an intolerable restrain on what is available for me. I must put up a defense against their welfare.

The current revolution needs to establish a defense against capitalism and a concern for the welfare of those it leaves behind.

Speaking for the trees is a Lorax’s joy.

The speaking, itself, is not a joy. Here there are some magical moments of inspired phrases filled with internal rhyme. When they fall out of our mouth and into our ear, we are encouraged. What might be our best conversional line is, first and foremost, energy to continue speaking. It is food for the movement when sustaining responses are few and far between. Without this gratification, our eyes cloud over and our ears are drawn to entertainment—we lose vision and understanding and fade away.

Speaking-for is difficult because it calls us to listen even more deeply, lest we begin to speak “as” rather than “for.” That small shift in orientation is critical, for we are a mistake-ready-to-be-made when we slide into the hypocritical space of mistaking ourself to be other than we are.

Speaking-for not only brings a reliance on only speaking what we know, devoid of the temptation to speculate just a wee bit. Sticking to fact and truth is work, for we so want to gossip and present ourselves as a hero (inclusively, he-ro and her-o). A proof is still a proof, and all work needs to be shown. Diligence is not usually included in the first-line virtues.

Speaking-for puts us in conflictual settings. There is no way to reliably confront those who speak so assuredly about their supposition of the reality of another’s life. Yet, speaking-for is a vocation ready to be in danger-territory by overstimulating those with kneed-jerk answers to questions life doesn’t ask. Speaking-for increases our vulnerability. Trolls abound, and executioners may weep, but they execute, nonetheless.

Speaking-for trees is Lorax work. At question is who and what I am speaking-for, you are speaking-for. To be effective, it is helpful for most folks to not speak-for more than two specifics. Blessings on discerning which voice to follow by putting it in your mouth.

religion can
only know itself
when scientifically explored

science can
only complete itself
when religiously appreciated

life can
claim its integrity
in exploring appreciation

culture can’t
dominate all else
given power’s partiality

wholeness can
remain virtually vital
playing a long-game

Who has authority to speak? For themself? For earth? For Who’s? For g*d?

Who has authority to speak while honoring the presence of another?

Speech often gets mixed up with dominion — an ability to have the last word.

Tricksters have the best opportunity to get away with speaking truth to power and avoid a standoff with authority. [Note: A current administration is tricky in getting its way but is not a trickster revealing a larger view.] Tricksters, like Coyote, are able to continue their work by periodically appearing with a teaching for folks open to it. Human tricksters such as Socrates and Jesus [Note: It is never warranted to name a contemporary.] seem to ply their trade for a while before unambiguously revealing their alternative truth to the old dictum that might-makes-right. Their usual modes of questions and riddles are but cover for a release from power claimed by a few, abetted by those fancying to take their place at the top of a pecking order based on imposing their will on others.

Tricksters poke at authority for a long while by using rhetorical ju-jitsu on rigidified custom. They walk a line that plays between outright challenge and irony as a tool of revolution.

Eventually, this pretense is put aside for all the skilled speech in the world does not substitute for the clarity of direct action.

It is only an authentic demonstration of in-born authority that reveals the choice set before the contemporary community. Free of a need to evade or dominate, a simple affirmation will do for the culture of the moment to settle the matter through a sentence of death upon the trickster.

Little is such a moment recognized in its time as the culmination of a long line of tests, a parade of set-ups, to pull a last reversal and birth of a new way. May you continue your work as a trickster until you can’t. Irony plays its part for a while and then steps aside for a simple declaration that now has space to echo.

We do like a good story
where the end is known
even amid new questions
last battles excite
as though they are last
every war intends
to be a last war
a war to end war
a war of victory
we do so want
to hear a first resolution
resolutely resolving
without a doubt
right order
nor do we desire
a reminder
of a last battle
in light of a first
won in a 40-day
silent resetting
of Living over Dead
no matter how debilitated
reclamation rests
awaiting an acknowledgment
of how bad it has gotten
it’s never too late
to start a compost heap
of lost chances
that we might look
upon them warned

In reading about the role of plot in a Gospel of Mark, I felt my hackles rise when I read about the use of conflict to identify the energy of the story: “The driving goal in Mark’s narrative is for God to establish rulership over the world.”

I applaud the attempt to move away from “kingdom” language but the emphasis on dominion or rule leaves us in the same divided and dissected condition as brought us to each state-of-affairs that follows its predecessor. 

Clothes were a first limit past which we were not able to return but only start a new line of fate. We are now expecting and put up with cycle-after-cycle of busted-born-busted~again. Somehow we can’t bridge the gap symbolized by unnecessary covering and return to some original partnership. Once an arbitrary test-line has been crossed, no amount of forgiveness or mercy seems to avail to re-establish a primary relationship. G*D goes back to being chief of the gods and humans return to creaturehood. Both have lost their ability to impact the other, to be partners.

A goal of returning to the impetus to relationship beyond the aloneness of ruling over all one can see and, through colonial surrogates, even that under another sun—seems much too small a goal.

The conflicts in Mark are not so much for overcoming as for resolving.

Here is another try that takes the open-ended conclusion of Mark into better account—the potential renewed relationships in the midst of ordinary life back home in Galilee. “The driving goal in Mark’s narrative is for human, non-humans, and meta-humans to re-establish a working relationship in the context of the whole of creation and any larger context it may have.”

The suzerainty of G*D is a very scratched lens through which to find the music of the spheres as expressed through “Coir an oir an oir an eer o” (https://youtu.be/0BOEE7-UhQM).

How does the world go on again, if not rolling toward morning? Try this song:
https://youtu.be/T0kmGoFH-X8.